From King's Canyon National Park we drove to Ukiah, California where we overnighted, then on to Humboldt Park where we traversed a part of the Avenue of the Giants, then up to Crescent City, California and Stout Memorial Grove. Map.
Tuesday, the 28th, was all driving, destination Ukiah. Not particularly on this day, but several times on our 2400 mile trip, we wished we had brought old-fashioned paper maps. Our Garmin GPS was invaluable, but has its weaknesses. One is really more the owner/operator's reluctance to spend the $75 necessary to update the mapping database. One of our hotels was not mapped properly (due to roadway changes a few years ago) and that lead us to question its directions in all successive legs where they were not very obvious.
From Ukiah on Wednesday we sought the Avenue of the Giants,
After the stretch where these photos were taken, the road was closed and we had to make our way back to US101. We turned off US101 a short time later to eat lunch at Redcrest. We found a little burger shop where Ma Kettle was chief cook, waitress, and bottle washer. Only one other table was patronized. We placed our order and were very satisfied with the meal. During the consumption of it, we noticed a few other patrons coming in but didn't pay a lot of attention. We had a good view of the road and were entertained by motorcyclists, an old car caravan, and other characters who parked near us and wandered about. When we finished we waited a while for our check and then realized that the place had filled up considerably, including a chap who had ordered a large take-out, so we went up to the register to relieve our hostess of some of the chore of checking us out. From there we could see into the kitchen and there was Poor Ma Kettle, flipping burgers with her right hand, packing a box with her left hand, and answering the phone with her other hand. We felt sorry for her and left an extra tip.
