In which Sid and Doris leave trendy Oregon for fading Eureka in California.
Sid goes for a run along Coos Bay waterfront and builds a breakfast appetite. The only breakfast place open is bustling and we are in just in time. From our neighbour at table we hear about the joys of a five day train trip across the US with sleeper and observation cars. Sounds good for another time. And Sid spots a fellow runner needing breakfast. We prise Sid off a model car shop window and sally froth.
Highway 101, our route for the day, is also marked up as the Pacific bicycle route. It looks utterly dismal. There will be some views at the price of constant horribly close traffic, the gradients are unrelenting and anyone doing it as their first epic trip would be put off cycle touring forever. Not a thing for another time. We drive thoughtfully over the “Bicyclist John Mello Memorial Bridge”. [In both these pictures the cyclist seems to have a lot of room, but note that the hard shoulder narrows immediately afterwards. On the tight bends it is less than a foot wide.]
Doris experiments with taking panorama-style photos in the car, not entirely successfully.
Hiding the evidence from the police, we stop for ice cream lunch at Brookings just before the California border. Info boards cover their March 2011 tsunami which came all the way from Japan to sink some fishing boats and smash up the marina. They are preparing the population to be ready for more as there has not been a big earthquake for a while and maybe there will be another.
We go to see the Brookings Chetco Indian memorial that tells the fate of the indigenous of the area once the settlers came. The tribe was down to about a tenth of the original population by 1856 (from settler massacres and disease) when the US Army death-marched those remaining to a ‘reservation’. There has been a lot of it about but it was another time.
And so, with Doris prising the wheel out of Sid’s grasp, past work to rebuild 101 after the landslips, toward Eureka and the famous Eureka Inn.
Eureka was a major lumber port dealing with the giant redwood logs that came down from the hills around with 140 schooners taking wood to build San Francisco. Then the railway came in 1914 bringing more people and in 1922 a road from San Francisco. The town was booming and prominent citizens got together to fund the building of a grand hotel for prominent travelers such as Sid and Doris. They also claim Churchill, Kennedy, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, Laurel and Hardy, and Humphrey Bogart. But we do not see Taylor Swift or Barack Obama.
We walk around the old town to see the Carson Mansion, pretty houses and theatres and other wonders from about 1850 to 1940. Not much good seems to have happened to the town since though it is growing, so maybe a diversified service economy doesn’t leave a lot of exciting evidence. When will we go to museums of chatbot software or delight in the architecture of the silicon chip fabs?
Eureka’s -est is to be the western-most town in the contiguous USA with a population of over 25,000 souls. Still for travelers from sea to shining sea it is a nice thing to have been west-est.