Oregon & Northern Californian Coast

The remnants of the typhoon were predicted to batter the Oregon Coast, and well, it delivered.....

We got to the coast where we camped at Cannon Beach, made famous as the beach on the movie 'The Goonies'!!!!

Poured rain all night, didn't get much sleep, plus the gap in the back door seal that we had been saying 'We had better seal that up at some stage' about for the past few weeks, began to leak.
We decided the best thing to do was just to drive and hope that the rain & wind would let up, it didn't, so for about 12 hrs we drove in torrential rain and super strong winds that at point we could see was blowing the rain faster than we were driving.
We stopped a few times along the way to get photos of the angry seas bashing the coast and also had to say hi to the T-Rex & Brontosaurus that were hanging out on the side of the road.

We drove the entire Oregon coast in a day, crossed into California where surely it 'never rains in sunny California', made an attempt at fixing the gap in the seal and then made camp for the night.
Delighted at waking to the sweet sound of waves and looking out into a bluebird sunny day, our next destination was 'Avenue of the Giants'.
Avenue of the Giants is a protected forest of giant Redwood trees, and they really were GIANTS! Standing mostly around 300ft tall and about 20ft wide, some of these trees have been around for thousands of years and it was incredible to think of all the moments in history that have occurred in the world while they have just hung out there in the forest.
Something very cool that we did, not only once but twice, was we drove/squeezed our van through a tree!!!

 

The day was just gorgeous and the more south we went, the more layers of clothing came off and eventually we were very stoked to be in shorts and singlets again!
The road from the giants eventually brought us back to the coast, and the effects from the storms meant surf was up and Kelly was frothing to find a surf town and hopefully get out into the water.
However, the Northern Californian coast was a lot different to what we expected...
Thinking that this state must be quite populated, we were surprised how barren the coast was. There were only a couple of hick towns along the way, with populations barely into the hundreds, and finding a place that looked half decent to get something to eat was a mission!! But more devastatingly, there were NO surf shops anywhere to be found, the first one we found was just North of San Francisco but by he time we got there it was closed.

The weather was amazing though and the views of the coast were just stunning, including the stunning view of my first Californian sunset.
There is something totally different to this sunset that I don't ever remember seeing before, it was like out of a movie, where the sun looks ginormous and you can see the complete outline of it the whole time, so beautiful.

We made camp about 10 miles out of San Fran on the top of a big mountain overlooking the city, although with the San Fran fog, there was no city to be seen the next morning.

Today we head into San Fran city, I'm really looking forward to this as I missed out on this last year due to our van 'Ronnie B' breaking down and cutting our trip short.