Many great adventures don’t start with a well-thought-out plan. We rented a car to explore the area beyond where we had been walking and riding the local transit bus. We wanted to go somewhere to hike in the 48,000-acre Jackson Demonstration State Forest, the largest of CAL FIRE’s ten demonstration state forests. These forests are called “Demonstration” forests because they are unique living laboratories where scientists, foresters, and researchers study the effects of forest management techniques. Lame name for a beautiful forest, but it says what it is.
We saw a lot of logging roads we could hike on, but they were all closed with gates. We stopped at “Camp 20 Recreation Area” (the naming committees are very literal in this part of the country), and a ranger there said we could park next to any of the logging roads in the forest and hike, but it had rained, and the roads were muddy. He sent us across the 2-lane Highway 20 to a trailhead that would offer a dryer hike. After we scurried across logs and a marshy area to get over puddles of water at the start of the trail, it was a beautiful redwood forest hike. On the way back, I had a plan that was sure to keep my feet dry…
I only had a little mud on my pants from “the incident”, and we were hungry, so we drove on to get lunch in Willits, the next town down the road. We ate at a cute place called The Loose Caboose Café. They had a wall plastered with photos and memorabilia of the famous racehorse, Sea Biscuit. They told us it was because the horse lived his life down the highway a bit and was buried there. To go see where Sea Biscuit is buried became our next mission. We ended up in a remote area that had an impressive, life-sized statue of Sea Biscuit in a random field (there was no path; we had to walk through unkept grass and water puddles) near a childcare place and another building. But we learned that he was buried in an undisclosed location in the surrounding pasture lands.
We were tired but decided we were close enough to the town of Ukiah to see it as well. The fishermen who gave us the crab the other day didn’t have a hose nozzle, so we bought an industrial-looking one at the Harbor Freight store for them. We drove through town and then headed back to the boat. Before returning the rental car tomorrow, we’ll make 2 or 3 trips to the gas station in town to jerry-jug diesel fuel to fill our tanks on Adventure.
The planning details usually fall to me, so it was nice to have a spontaneous day full of unexpected adventures.
Author: Kathy
Tales of Misadventure 