Roadtrip to California - Day 1

Brian and I woke up at 3:30am on Saturday morning. Falling asleep wasn't easy, we had people at the house for some beers and chatting the night before. I woke up with a slight hangover but after a cold shower, it slowly faded away. We loaded up the car and hit the road by 4:10am. We drove straight to Portland, were we stopped at Albina Press for coffee and a delicious best ever huckleberry scone. Albina must have been open for only minutes since it was barely after 7am. The barista was so nice and excited to hear about our trip. She has only been in Portland for a year now but shared her enthusiasm for us visiting California (Cali transplant) for the first time. I feel like everyday I'm reminded at how rad Portland is. After Portland, we drove to Eugene, Oregon. Officially the most south we have ever been! We celebrated in the car by playing tunes loudly. Afterward, we stopped at a grocery store for camping food and lunch, realizing that Eugene would be the biggest city we would see for a really long time.

We headed for Florence, OR via Hwy 101. The drive included the beautiful countryside of Oregon and much of it's breathtaking coast line. Florence was great. It's a small coastal town that heeds some of the largest sand dunes in North America. Supposedly many dunes have been recorded to be around 300 feet tall (which I realize now are about as tall as the giant redwood trees Brian and I would see later). We paid $12 to hop into a dune buggy and ride around on these gigantic sand dunes. There were a ton of people riding the dunes, many on quads and motorcross bikes, far larger than the dunes Brian and I braved.

After an hour in the buggy, we hopped back in the car towards Del Norte Coast State Park. Our destination was still another 3 hrs away and by this time we have been driving for about 11hrs so we were really ready to get to camp and chill out. Finding the campsite was simple. We set up camp about an hour before sunset, made a fire, ate some chili, and drank some tecates. No bears sightings at this camp but they did have bear boxes. The air was moist and chilly but we fell asleep rather easily after such a long day of traveling. I woke up at 4am with the urge to use the bathroom but I was not getting up by myself to walk to the bathrooms alone in bear country were no bears have been sighted in some time but I get a feeling I will see the first in a while. So I fell back asleep...