Towards Y2K9 (13): Lost Coast

If you go south on the coast highway 101 from Eureka, California, you will notice that the 101 at one point goes away from the coast for quite a while. When this highway was built, the area was decided to be too difficult, and it was bypassed - the result is a large piece of remote mountain and coast land that is hardly visited by anyone, and is for that reason called the Lost Coast.

Our travel guide book recommended to go there and so we did of course (as many other German tourists I guess), after a very enjoyable day in Eureka with its beautiful old victorian wooden houses and wonderful coffee places.

It turned out that yes, the area is beautiful and scenic. The roads across it are often steep and winding, and that it took much longer for us to pass through than we had expected. But we were rewarded with wonderful vistas.

We watched hawks that were soaring above us in the hot summer air, on top of mountains, in deep silence.


Coming down to the coast, the fog got us again. The sand was darker here, the waves of the Pacific looked cold, there were no other people and we hardly met other cars. We really felt like we were at the end of the world. Or like in some Western movie.


Because the roads had been so steep, the fuel was almost gone at the end of the day, and it got dark. But we were very lucky that we made it to Westport, a village that had once been a bustling industry town and that is now mostly inhabited by a few retired people.

The Westport Inn and Deli is a motel run by its very nice 82 year old owner - we slept very tight and got a nice complimentary breakfast in the morning - and on the other side of the street, there was a tiny fuel station, so we were saved and could continue our trip ...



... going south towards Mendocino (a place whose name got very famous in Germany in 1969 because of a "Schlager" song by German singer Michael Holm).