Hitched and Rolling

Waking up in the Jedediah Smith wilderness outside of Crescent City, we were now officially in California. We woke at an RV park along the Smith River which truly is a beauty. After a morning fetch routine, breakfast at a little diner, and stopping on a couple bridges to look into the glassy blue clear water, we continued south on the 101.

Around lunch time, probably 12:30, we stopped in Eureka CA. After a quick fetch session with the beast we did some lunch-oriented googling and realized that Eureka was actually known for Oysters. We found that the main oyster restaurant in town was not going to open for another 90 minutes so we decided to go to the grocery store and see if we could get some there. We did end up getting some there, along with a shucker, and we ate them in the park, but they were not very well-shucked (full of bits of shell), and by the time we had done our shop and park-shuck it was just a few minutes until the popular place opened so we just headed over there to be the first customers.

The wait paid off. WOW! This place was fantastic. The restaurant was called Humboldt Bay Provisions. They have a unique policy where in order to work in the restaurant you have to also work on the boats in the bay. The guy working there explained that the policy makes it really hard to find employees (people with both skill sets and interests are rare), but also makes it so that the employees who they do hire are very knowledgable.

The Oysters that they had there were absolutely amazing. Apparently this bay in Humboldt supplies 70% of the Oysters in the entire state, including a lot of the famous places in San Francisco. We ended up having a dozen each, in a few installments of 6. Some broiled and some fresh. 

Climbing back into the van we pressed south eventually arriving in Sonoma California for the evening. After an unfortunately radiused turn at a gas station left our silver chariot with a blue scar,  we found our way up and up and up a moonlit windy hill to a state park. Being that we were in Sonoma, California (and having just scraped the side of the van on a gas station’s pump-protecting concrete pillar), we had picked up a bottle of local red wine which we enjoyed at our moonlit mountaintop resting spot.