Day 31, Saturday, July 16

After a lazy morning and pancake breakfast, we broke camp and headed further up Hwy 1 to Fort Bragg. We’d only gone about 10 miles when we came across another beach (the outlet of Salmon Creek, I want to say). We decided to hike down with the intention off spending a half hour or so. We spent nearly 3 hours! It was one of the nicest beaches I’ve ever played on. It would have been any kid’s dream beach. There were driftwood forts all over. People had used the drift wood like Lincoln Logs and had constructed tepees, square forts, pathways and all sorts of other imaginary domains. The creek that emptied into the ocean at that point was full of great skipping rocks and had lots of areas where you could have gone swimming with some even deep enough to have dived into. Jeanette found a natural lounge chair depression on a piece of drift wood the size of a delivery van (it had to be part of the trunk of an ancient redwood tree) and I played around on the beach and in the creek. I felt like I was being transported back to my childhood days of playing in the creeks in Western North Carolina. What a treat! After leaving that beach we decided to head up to Fort Bragg. We’d been told that it was a cute touristy town with a nice little down town area to browse. We were told wrong. Ft Bragg had, so far as I could tell, essentially nothing to recommend it. Every store we looked at seemed to be of the sort where you walk out thinking "That was kind of interesting stuff, but why would anybody every buy any of it, and how on earth can they afford to pay their rent selling trinkets like that?" Late afternoon we decided that we ought to head on over to wine country. Earlier on my trip, I’d looked up camp sites in the Napa area and found one that kept on getting recommended over and over, Bothe Napa Valley State Park. Unfortunately, when I called Thursday to try to make reservations I was told that the park was completely booked up and that there was basically no chance of us getting a site. "However there’s a fair ground near by where you can pitch your tent and you can come back to the park for showers." Both Jeanette and I figured that, given the run of good luck we were having on this trip so far, that we’d try it anyway. We pulled up to the visitors center at around 8:30, confident that we were going to be told that we were going to have to sleep out in the barn. Not so. According to the ranger we talked with, she’d already turned away half a dozen families looking for a camp site but just realized that she’d overlooked their overflow campsite which was still sitting empty. Turns out that the overflow campsite was far and away the best site in the entire park. Most of the other campsites in the park weren’t even remotely as nice as ours. Good proximity to the bath house, fully shaded (most of the other sites were full sun sites), no artificial lights, smooth level tent site, and completely hidden from all neighboring campsites. Perfect! Campfire roasted hot dogs and a 6-pack of suds made it a prefect night. Oh yeah…NO mosquitoes!