1 Oct 2021
Book Find in Ferndale

This morning we had breakfast in our Best Western motel! This is the first time since the lockdown that we have stayed in a hotel or motel which provides Boo! sit-down breakfast, and this one was back to the traditional motel meal - eggs, pancakes from the pancake machine, little sausages, toast from the toast machine, etc. We see this as a Good Sign.

We ventured out to tour Eureka and vicinity, beginning with Arcata. The sky was full of thick moist clouds which deposited spatters of mist on our windshield. Arcata is the home of Humboldt State University, which accounts for all the young people we saw. Several youths with thick growths of hair were carrying skateboards and sleeping rolls. We found the plaza which tourist literature says is the gathering Carson House, Eureka place in town, but we were hours too early for any gathering to take place.

Leaving Arcata, we drove by the Eureka Zoo, but the damp weather kept us from entering. Nevertheless, we enjoyed the early Halloween decorations. But we began missing our turns on the back roads; the lesson for today was Maps Are Not Perfect. During our drive we tried to find the Maritime Museum and the Visitor Center for Eureka and Humboldt County, but nothing similar could be found at the addresses shown on our maps. We also found that the Coast Guard Plaza contained no traces of any Coast Guard presence, although there were some nice flags. As often happens, places are given names and glowing reports before any buildings are actually built.

Because we failed to find good directions in the tourist maps, we chose spontaneous sightseeing. Hand-woven native baskets It's hard to miss the famous Carson House (owned by a private membership club). The Waterfront road led us past a large marina (though not as beautiful as that in Crescent City). The Clark Museum in Eureka, in a former government building, now houses the history museum and a good array of tourist information including more maps. Most impressive was a display of Native American basketwork, much of it from the 1920s and 1930s: intricate designs woven into the baskets made of reeds, grapevines and hazel sticks. It was paired with an exhibit of crazy quilts including explanations of how they are constructed. We were struck by the elaborate embroidery on the stitching attaching quilt blocks together (the quilts passed down to use had no use for extra embroidery or fancy stitches).

For lunch, we found Adel's restaurant. We chose it from nostalgia because when Bob was working Street in Victorian Ferndale with Admiral Sparks, the three of us often ate at his favorite Adel's in Windsor, California. The bacon-lettuce-tomato-avocado sandwich must be the classic California sandwich.

After lunch we turned south toward Fortuna, and stopped at the Loleta Cheese Factory, a major attraction on our map. It was not only closed; it looked abandoned.

The 1911 bridge to Ferndale, however, was as sturdy as ever, and the town seems thriving. The Victorian buildings with their multi-colored painted ornamentation sparkled in the afternoon sun. We stopped at a bookstore which had a used book section in the rear. Bob plucked three hardbound Elizabeth George novels with dust jackets (we are currently moving through her Thomas Lynley series) which pick up just after the books we have already found. The total purchase came to eighty cents, and one of the books was signed by the author!

We decided that our book purchase outweighed any complaints we might have about maps - after all, we found them!