Labour Day long weekend (I guess it's 'Labor Day' since I'm down here...) found Sara and I in a town called Eureka. Yes, there really is a Eureka, California. :) It's about a six hour drive north of San Francisco.
We went up specifically to visit The Avenue of the Giants, a stretch of road that winds through the giant Redwood forest up there. This is where the Endor sequences were filmed in Return of the Jedi.
The trees were amazing, but on our way up we took the coastal highway and stopped into a couple beaches on our way up. We saw some amazing things on our trip, including deer on somebody's driveway and a penguin on the beach!!! We have no idea what a penguin was doing by itself on a beach in Northern California, but it was pretty cool. We also saw some not-so-cool things: the rotting carcass of a sea lion and the picked-clean-of-flesh bones of a coyote-sized animal.
Take a look at the photos.