Drizzle may have hidden some views on the coastal highway, but it was still an awesome drive from San Francisco north to the Redwood forests, here's the journal entry I wrote that evening:

This morning we woke up in Berkley – a town near to San Francisco, it was a little overcast, but clearer than yesterday., so we got to see more of the bridge and bay on our drive. Leaving our lovely layby early we soon joined the early morning commuter traffic on Interstate 80. Avoiding the traffic we took an alternate route, which took us past loads of fast food restaurants – all advertising breakfast specials – these eventually got the better of us and we stopped at a Jack in The Box in San Rafael for a sausage biscuit. Biscuits over here aren't digestives (they call those cookies), it's halfway between an English muffin and a scone – which is confusing when places advertise buscuits and gravy, because gravy is't gravy either.

With breakfast sorted we continued along Sir Frances Drake Blvd joining highway one (the continuation of the pacific coastal highway we travelled along from San Diego) and stopped off at the Bear Visitor Centre where they've got an earthquake trail. We were right on the San Andreas fault zone and it was kindof scary to be stood there watching the seismograph readings: the needle was wobbling while we were there, indicating some sort of activity deep within the earth. Apparently that's normal and wasn't large enough for us to feel anything, we'd have been completely unaware of it had we not been watching the meter, which is I guess what makes them useful.

Making good use of their taps we filled up our water bottles (we've got 8 or so 1 gallon bottles we keep in Macy since lots of campsites don't have runing water), and headed onwards leaving the otherwise quiet fault zone to coach load of noisy school children.

I forget the name of the next small village we passed through, but it had a library and therefore we were able to grab a brief bit of time online and update our friends and family. We've been writing journals and articles while we've been on the road but in the allotted time we don't often have chance to type them up and even if we did have sufficient time, the computers are so restrictive in what they let you do that we wouldn't have chance to upload photos and video – it's getting a little be frustrating not being able to document our trip as we would like.

Anyway, after our 30 minutes elapsed we headed onwards, north on highway one through lots of little fishing villages all selling barbecued oysters and on to the surf beaches. It could have been a bad day on the Cornish coast looking out over the windswept beaches, with drizzel in the air. The trees and locals both painted the picture that this was perfectly normal weather – even when the wind died down the trees still help their wind swept appearence, just like the poor trees planted at Beachy Head. The locals were milling around in swimsuits on the beach or bobbing around like neoporene seals just behind the break. Sharon and I didn't fancy venturing outside of Macy's warm embrace.

We continued northwards, hugging the coast and occasionally geting a glimpse of the rugged rocky shore line and the vast ocean beyone, but mainly we were peering at the inside of a cloud. By early evening the coast had grown so rugged that the coastal highway gave up and headed in land, carrying us towards the huge Redwood forests. Stopping for gas we discovered we were 1/4 mile from the a tree you could drive through. So we followed the signs to the shrine of the drive-thru tree, it was down drive-thru tree road and in drive-thru tree park (note their imaginative naming scheme), We paid our admission and drove along the road to the tree, only to find that we couldn't drive through it. It was a small gap, which would have been large enough for most English cars, but not for Macy (who's small by US standards). A little bit digruntled, we managed to get a refund and then headed onwards to find a place to sleep and eat. Luckily the rain abaited while we cooked our maccaroni/couliflour/broccili cheese and then a nice large and quiet layby presented itself.

David

(written 4th June, typed up 9th June)