Yesterday is a great start. And today I feel the emptiness after the great start. I feel a bit tired when I finally opened my eyes for today. Kids and wife get up at 8AM, and finish their cereal breakfast at 8:30AM. We took everything to the car and take a short walk to the waterfront of clear lake. There’s Cyanobacteria (blue-green bacteria) in water, so the lake doesn’t looks clear at all. There’s couple of folks phishing on lake, can’t see their passion.
We drive around the lake, and after half hour we arrived at Lakeport. We didn’t plan to stop here, but we want to fuel some coffee for the morning. Then I found Angelina’s Bakery & Espresso on the map, and we sit here and have a quality breakfast. Triple shots latte, Mixed berry Scone, 2 scoops of ice-cream for kids. This is a busy coffee shop, the town is quite quiet and in contrast the coffee shop have waves of customers having breakfast and coffee here. This coffeeshop also sell cooking linens, cooking equipment and mugs. I can feel the family and appreciation of cooking in this little coffeeshop. They have a double broiler coffee machine and a rocky grinder, it’s amazing that they can support a busy coffee shop with this equipment. American’s like dipper coffee, which make serving tons of customer easier.
Every old town have their book shops. This town apparently have long history too, there’s some old buildings as museum in this water side town. The Watershed Books is a good used/new book store to us. We bought 3 art books here, they are not as cheap as the Treehorn books. But the owner must love books too. They label books by mixture of topic and alphabet. And the store have high ceiling. I love the ceiling sky light design, and there’s a banana tree by the bookshelf. There’s also humidity control in this bookstore, which helps preserve those old books.
We played Frisbee for 10 minutes at the water front park. It’s quiet and have good natural shade. It’s quite cool in shade, and the lawn is newly cut. Kids spend their energy running and caching freebee.
We hit the road again, and the target is Eureka, CA. This is a long drive, 4+ hours. I actually enjoy driving at constant speed. I feel smooth, and imagine I’m flying on the open landscape. There’s not much bad drivers, people are not in super hurry to drive on this country road. Hannah is reading comics, and flora is watching the scenic road. My wife is busy with her phone. We switched for 20 minutes, but I can tell my wife doesn’t enjoy the driving like I do 🙂
We saw some giant redwood during the drive. But we didn’t stop, because kids can’t wait to arrive Eureka and swim in hotel.
We arrived the red line hotel in Eureka, and it’s decent. Kids enjoyed the heated pool. And we played in warm water under the sun for a hour. It’s quite challenging to play with 2 monkeys in water. Because they can easily drown me under the deep water. I need to hold the edge of pool to keep everyone safe. So that’s quite a lot of muscle tensions.
After the pool hour, we have a warm shower and then looking for dinner. We choose the “Cafe waterfront” in downtown Eureka. We visited, and they told us come back 10 minutes later. Kids played at the water fountain. And we did couple of window shopping (stores are closed at this time, 6:30PM at Monday’s night, it’s July 4th holiday tomorrow) in the downtown area, there’s 2 very attractive book store but closed. There’s a comic videos, games, books collective store here. Kids doesn’t enjoy them, but that’s eye catching for their parents. When we went back to cafe waterfront we found there’s a long queue now. So we just give up to claim our position in queue.
Then we went to Humboldt Bay Provisions, this is a nice looking wine tasting and food place. But we’ve been told it was under-staff so there’s only wine and fresh oyster tonight. They recommended 2 restaurants to us. And we went to 1 of it called Mazzotti’s Old Town, it’s a Italian restaurant. My wife had the fish paster and I had the Scrampi shrimp pasta. The fresh backed bread dipping olive oil and vinegar wins the kids. We have 3 breads tonight. My wife have the strawberry puree soda and I had a Pinot Noir table wine. The cooking is a bit slow, and the quality is OK. But this is exactly what the family need to satisfy our hungry soul, we forgot to have lunch today. Oh, talk about lunch, we did have a stop in a town in nowhere. There’s a big grocery store, but we just bought a potato salad because it’s just like a Safeway or something, which has nothing special.
After the dinner, we send wife and kids back to hotel and drive out for a beer. There’s a good brewery here which is famous, the “The Lost Coast Brewery” which have interesting label design. I had 2 small pour of beer tonight, the Indica and Fog cutter. I just bring out my phone and search for top beers on my favorite rate beer. Apparently people love this brewer on rate beer, but the individual beer rating is not top notch. The pub have halloween themed decoration, which is like a humor. They are very proud of their beer and the tap design looks nice. I love the Indica, the tap version is dramatically better than their bottled beer. It’s much much better feeling than yesterday’s Racer 5. Racer 5 is phenomenal in bottle, but the Indica is amazing on tap. Highly recommend to visit this brewery for beers. They have about 25 beers on tap, mostly their own beers. They have 4 fruity wheat here too, I like their variations. It feels like a good brewery for thirsty surfers, like the famous Pizza Port brewing. Their beer label are very interesting, they must be very proud of those. You can find lots of different souvenirs here.
And then, the day is over. We will visit Redwood National Park tomorrow. And we figured out a rough plan of where we will stay tomorrow. No booking, just a rough plan, see what we will get. BTW, the red lion is great (tonight just cost $103 after tax), which is a good deal. I love their 55 inch TV plus direct TV, kids are very happy with both TV and swimming pool. This hotel is booked yesterday, so it’s not exactly like what we planned of doing booking at last minute to avoid a busy commuting. I regret a little bit today, because if we don’t book it here we may spend more time resting along the road. I don’t like to stress out at moving to target on time.
