West Coast - Day 9

Today I walked through the forest moon of Endor, and it could not have been a better experience. We packed up and left the hotel and drove through Crescent City to Jedediah Smith park, which is where the Endor scenes from The Return of the Jedi were filmed. There is a grove in the park, and the road to it is 4 miles of almost single lane gravel through the forest, and as soon as we started down the road you could tell that the area looked just like in the movie. We had to drive quite slow, so it took around 20 minutes to get to the parking area, but I did not mind.

After parking, we started walking through the path in the forest, which was very fascinating. As I mentioned, you could just see Endor everywhere you looked, and I had Sandra take my picture in a number of places that looked a lot like the movie. I joked that she will have to use GIMP on those pictures to add in some scout troopers. (As an aside, telling Xander about where we were going backfired a bit, as he was expecting to see Ewoks and Stormtroopers, and was a bit disappointed when all we saw were trees.) The walk was impressive, even for non-geek reasons, as the trees were very impressive. We all posed inside a hollow stump left after a lightning strike (redwoods are quite fire resistant, so if lightning ignites one tree, usually on the inside, that is the only tree that burns), as well as beside the huge roots of a fallen tree. As we left the area, the sun started to come out, as it had been cloudy in the morning, and it made me realize that we had been lucky with the clouds, as that had helped contribute to the area looking like Endor. Once the sun came out, some of the illusion was lost. We also lucked out with our extra hour this morning, as we beat the rush out to the grove. When we left, there was a large group of cars circling the parking lot, waiting for a place to park.

We took a different path out of the park, which included a much shorter drive on a slow gravel road and a longer drive on a highway. Once we got back to US-101, we headed north to Oregon and stopped for lunch just across the border. Not long after that, we arrived at a beach, where we stopped to explore and take some pictures. Unfortunately, the wind really picked up along the coast, and it was very windy out on the beach. Xander, at least on the beach, no longer cares about the wind, but Evan refused to walk on his own. We explored the beach a bit, as there were a lot of large rocks on it, before we went back to the car and continued on our way.

The drive out of Brookings, Oregon is along the coast and there were a lot of great places to stop and admire the view. If only it had not been so windy, so that we could have left the car and explored a bit. We contented ourselves with stopping occasionally and looking around. The Oregon coast is very rocky, which is beautiful to see - large rocks jutting out into the ocean, covered with grass and trees. Eventually the road left the coast and we just drove up to Coos Bay, where we arrived at our hotel. Xander fell asleep right as we entered town and Sandra was able to carry him up to our room and put him on the bed without waking him up. He slept as we ordered some food for supper and hoped that the NASCAR race wasn't rained out - unfortunately it was, which was kind of annoying, as I had been hoping to spend the evening relaxing and watching the race. I guess the day started out too perfectly to also end perfectly.