I felt much better this morning! I wonder what caused that feeling of weakness and fatigue yesterday. Was it just allergies? Taking too much Claritin? Whatever....
We had another pleasant breakfast in the dining room at the Inn with Edie by my side. Well, I suspect I enjoyed it more than Edie did who seemed to find it pretty boring. I had the same breakfast of Egg Benedict with mushrooms instead of bacon that I did yesterday, and once again it was pretty good. We returned to the room and packed up. I checked carefully for anything plugged into the wall since I did not want to leave something here. We paid the bill (gulp!) and headed up the road.
Since the day was pretty we decided to hug the coast as much as possible. We skipped through Fort Bragg, feeling like we had pretty much done it yesterday, and continued on. We stopped for a while at a beach about half an hour north of town so that Edie could get out and romp around a bit. She had a great time, and got completely wet a couple times running through unexpectedly deep water. She seemed to not mind getting wet, though. There was even another dog there for her to play with for a bit.
We continued on through some parts of Highway 1 that I don't remember ever seeing before. Maybe it was the sunshine that made the scenery look so unfamiliar. After a while Highway 1 merged into the 101 as we went past the Lost Coast and through the redwood parks. We stopped in Crescent City for gas. We briefly checked out staying there for the evening, since the weather was so unusually lovely, but none of the hotels that appealed to us took dogs and the one or two that took dogs were pretty unappealing.
We continued up US 199 towards Grants Pass. It was for the most part a very pretty drive. There were some parts where I noticed quite a few dead trees. I wonder if this is more problem with the bark beetle? We considered staying the night somewhere along the way, but no place really appealed to us. So we continued on into Grants Pass to a place recommended in one of the dog books.
We found the Riverside Inn without too much difficulty. It's not quite as nice as the book made it sound, but it does have a nice location right on the banks of the Rogue River. We unpacked and then took a walk down to the river. Along the way we saw some white wino (a classic bum) sprawled out unconscious on the path. We walked across a WPA-era bridge and explored a small city park on the other side of the river. We ate supper at a mediocre Mexican restaurant where we heard the most astonishing display of white trash family relationship outside of the Jerry Springer show. It was so hard not to laugh out loud at lines like "I've been taking the last two weeks off work." "I know. It's your community service the court ordered." I only wished I could have seen the pictures of the new trailer (evidently at least a double-wide) or known just how huge the still fat girl had been before she lost all the weight.
We strolled through the "historic" quarter of Grants Pass before returning to the hotel room.
