{"id":1204,"date":"2013-09-02T21:47:07","date_gmt":"2013-09-03T04:47:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thelawlers.com\/Blognosticator\/?p=1204"},"modified":"2013-09-05T03:28:28","modified_gmt":"2013-09-05T10:28:28","slug":"vacation-for-the-blognosticator","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thelawlers.com\/Blognosticator\/?p=1204","title":{"rendered":"Vacation for the Blognosticator"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Blognosticator<\/a><\/p>\n

I finished ten weeks of teaching summer quarter on Wednesday, I turned in my grades on Thursday, and on Friday at the crack of dawn my wife and I headed up California\u2019s Highway 101 to the Bay Area, and then across the Golden Gate Bridge into Marin County, and onward to Sonoma and Mendocino Counties.<\/p>\n

We are taking a short California vacation because next week I have to be in Chicago for PRINT 13. We\u2019re staying tonight in southern Humboldt County on the famous Avenue of the Giants, a stretch of road that is surrounded by some of the oldest and largest trees in the world. These are the Sequoia Sempervirens variety, some of which exceed 400 feet in height. They are unbelievable.<\/p>\n

\"MirandaNeon\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This is the timeless neon sign in front of our resort. There are enough spider webs \u2013 and spiders \u2013 on this sign to impress the greatest entomologist! This actually means that the sign has not needed repair in a long, long time.<\/span><\/em>
\n<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

We\u2019re staying in one of those cabins where we stayed in the 1950s when we were children. And, earlier today, we drove through the Chandelier Tree in Leggett, a living redwood tree that was hollowed-out in the 1920s to allow just this \u2013 automobiles to drive through the tree. It\u2019s amusing to think that this giant tree continues to thrive despite having probably millions of cars drive through its gigantic trunk. My station wagon cleared the walls with about eight inches to spare.<\/p>\n

\"BrianInTree\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2026and this is me with my head sticking out of the sunroof. The hood ornament was crooked for three days before I noticed it and fixed it.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

Believe it or not, there was a long line of cars with patient occupants waiting to go through the tree. Each of us stopped at the exit and posed for photos. It was strangely like the same event I experienced in the back of a 1956 Mercury station wagon with my dad at the wheel. This time I stuck my head out of the sunroof and waved as my wife took a photo. It was charming, and I was impressed that one can still drive a car through a tree.<\/p>\n

As I sat on the porch of my cabin this evening, I took a phone call from a friend who was having trouble with a time-lapse movie he was making. I spent about thirty minutes on the phone; I was working from memory, he was working on the screen of his computer. In the middle of the conversation we talked about Syria, and a little about Iraq, and a little bit about Afghanistan, then back to QuickTime Pro 7. It was a wide ranging conversation.<\/p>\n

This is supposed to be a vacation!<\/p>\n

It was nice to talk to my friend, and I don\u2019t mind these \u201ctech support\u201d calls because they are a great opportunity for me to flex my mental muscles and work from memorized menus rather than real ones. I have gone almost a day with no access to e-mail, and it will be another two days before I am back on the Internet. I\u2019m typing on my MacBook Air on battery power. My wife is reading a novel on her iPad while I am writing this. Far from primitive, I\u2019m enjoying being \u201cunplugged\u201d at least for a couple of days. I don\u2019t want to be connected for this vacation, but I am content to be writing.<\/p>\n

Tomorrow we plan to hike a trail in the Redwoods National Park, followed by a drive along a lonely road to the \u201cLost Coast\u201d \u2013 a section of California\u2019s northern coast which highway engineers deemed too rugged to build a highway. I am carrying my GigaPan camera mount and a bag of camera equipment. I don\u2019t yet know if there will be panoramic opportunities along that road, but I hope I can make at least one image while we\u2019re out there.<\/p>\n

Another day in the redwoods<\/p>\n

It\u2019s now the end of the second day on the Avenue fo the Giants. We started with a nice homemade breakfast in our cabin, followed by a nice hike along Bull Creek in the Humboldt Redwood State Park. Then we took the drive west along the Mattole Road from the western edge of the state park to the ocean. This is obviously a road less traveled. It starts by climbing several thousand feet out of the redwood forest and into a series of changing ecosystems that range from grassland to huge Douglas Fir trees interspersed with California Madrones.<\/p>\n

\"Founder's<\/a><\/p>\n

This is the Founders\u2019 Tree, one of the most impressive of the Sequoia Sempervirens in the park. It stands over 400 feet tall, and it\u2019s thousands of years old.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

When finally we reached the tiny town of Honeydew, numerous hairpin turns later, we stopped to buy a popsicle and to see the general store. Gas was available for $5.00 a gallon, and there were a variety of supplies that anyone that far away from civilization might need. The locals came and went, packing boxes of groceries and drinks. It\u2019s more than an hour to the \u201cbig city\u201d to the east, that city having only 300 citizens.<\/p>\n

From Honeydew we continued on the another metropolis \u2013 Petrolia \u2013 which boasts 60 citizens. In both cases, these small towns serve as both a source for supplies, and the social center of each community.<\/p>\n

California is currently hosting two huge fires: one along the northern edge of Yosemite National Park, the other just a few miles east of Highway 101 in Humboldt County. Thousands of firefighters are working to contain these fires and to rescue as many homes and buildings as possible. In Honeydew, the local volunteer fire department has cancelled all burn permits \u2013 they don\u2019t want to invite the disasters of the rest of the state upon themselves in this hard to reach valley.<\/p>\n

The road to the ocean finally delivered us to the shore \u2013 so close that there were Tsunami Zone warning signs along the side of the road as it crossed a couple of miles of sand dunes at the westernmost point of California. Soon, though, we were back up in the mountains on a steep and curvy road that takes it time getting from the \u201clost coast\u201d to the town of Ferndale.<\/p>\n

I never found a location for a GigaPan photo, but I did take a lot of still photos, and a couple of experimental vertical panoramas in the Redwood State Park. I\u2019ll process those when I get home on Wednesday, and if there is anything exciting there, I will post an example here.<\/p>\n

Tomorrow it\u2019s another day of day hikes and redwood tree adventures. This place is really spectacular.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I finished ten weeks of teaching summer quarter on Wednesday, I turned in my grades on Thursday, and on Friday at the crack of dawn my wife and I headed up California\u2019s Highway 101 to the Bay Area, and then … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[52,63,64,48,50,51,46,47,49],"class_list":["post-1204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adventures","tag-avenue-of-the-giants","tag-blognosticator","tag-brian-lawler","tag-humboldt-redwoods","tag-miranda","tag-neon-signs","tag-redwoods","tag-sequoia-sempervirens","tag-state-parks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelawlers.com\/Blognosticator\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelawlers.com\/Blognosticator\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelawlers.com\/Blognosticator\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelawlers.com\/Blognosticator\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelawlers.com\/Blognosticator\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1204"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thelawlers.com\/Blognosticator\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1204\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1210,"href":"https:\/\/thelawlers.com\/Blognosticator\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1204\/revisions\/1210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelawlers.com\/Blognosticator\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelawlers.com\/Blognosticator\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelawlers.com\/Blognosticator\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}