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The long pale winter. Need some sun. The mission: Go to see redwoods in Northern California. Accomplished? Hell yes. Occasionally you take a trip that turns out to be way more than you thought it would be. I took off Saturday morning and jetted up to Oakland and hung with Keith a bit. We plowed through a Pizza at Zachary’s [LINK<\/a>] in Oakland and then I hit the road on my way up to Ukiah [LINK<\/a>]. Of course with no reservations on Memorial day weekend you stay at any motel that has a vacancy. I couldn’t even tell you where I stayed now. Sunday I got up and drove up to Humboldt Redwoods State Park [LINK<\/a>], which rules in tall tree sorta way. It’s almost the same feeling as diving in the kelp forests off the coast. Same kind of dappled light and towering columns. After getting out of the car a million times to walk around the forests, I made my way through one grove and down to the Eel river [LINK<\/a>]. It was a beautiful emerald green and not at all cold, so I jumped right in. Not a person in sight and a whole river to myself. It was friggin’ perfect. After about and hour of swimming around I walked back to the car and headed to the coast. Made my way down Mendocino and back to Ukiah where I had to find another place to stay. As I was coming down the road a big dust cloud caught my eye and I spotted a speedway [LINK<\/a>]. At first I thought it was a demolition derby because of all the dust and tow trucks I saw. After I pull up to the fairgrounds I find out it’s just regular racing and that the local racers just suck at racing. It was hilarious. People with ballcaps with flames on them and sucking down cotton candy. That’s pretty much my impression of the crowd. Oh and lots of blue eyeliner. After about 10 races I got tired and found a hotel which I had to have three rooms before I found one that was made up. All the rooms had sheets all over, wet towels, etc. They finally apologized with a clean room and some complimentary cookies. I was pretty punchy from being so tired I actually didn’t mind. I just kept dragging my lugagge and cameras wherever they told me to go. Monday I got up and headed back to Oakland where I met up with Keith and Shelli again and we ran through a song I was writing with Shelli. A Bernie Elton kinda thing. She has more to say than I do so she wrote the lyrics. Then home. Nice trip.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"[IMAGE GALLERY] [VIDEO LINK] The long pale winter. Need some sun. The mission: Go to see redwoods in Northern California. Accomplished? Hell yes. Occasionally you take a trip that turns out to be way more than you thought it would be. I took off Saturday morning and jetted up to Oakland and hung with Keith […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,16,18,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","category-photography","category-travel","category-video"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1MOCs-5j","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chasethelight.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chasethelight.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chasethelight.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chasethelight.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chasethelight.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=329"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/chasethelight.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chasethelight.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chasethelight.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chasethelight.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}