View of the Sausalito Bay from Spinnaker restaurant.

For quite a few weekends now we’ve been active, going on trips to see the coast and lighthouses along it. On Saturday (June 23rd) we were driving up on Highway 1, just north of Monterey, when Tobia asked me how many more lighthouses I wanted to see. Earlier that day we went to the Santa Cruz lighthouse, our 8th in the series of fifteen I have been wanting to see. With 7 more remote lighthouses to go we realized the remaining ones were no longer day trip type adventures.

As our minds started churning, we realized that an upcoming 4th of July vacation would give us 4 days of roaming California’s far north coast. A few hours later at home, I started grinding out so many different combinations of trip options.

After 8 excited days of planning and mind changes, I settled on 4 lighthouses in 4 days. Battery Point lighthouse in Crescent City, Trinidad Head lighthouse in Trinidad, Cape Mendocino lighthouse (relocated) in Shelter Cove and Point Arena in… well, Point Arena. Included in the trip were also plans to see Cape Mendocino- the Western most point in California and also where beautiful Sugar Loaf Rock/Island can be seen- as well as the famous Drive Thru Tree in Leggett.

As the days neared, I could hardly contain myself and couldn’t stop thinking about the trip. Even though we didn’t plan to leave until Thursday the 5th at 5am, we changed our minds again, and decided to get an early start on Wednesday the 4th. We figured by conquering part of the drive we would have more time to either sleep or spend at the sites. That and we couldn’t sit still at home any longer in anticipation of this trip.

We booked a hotel in the North part of Santa Rosa. On the trip up to Santa Rosa we ate at the fabulous Spinnaker restaurant in Sausalito. We followed this with a trip along the town and some ice cream. We pulled into our Santa Rosa hotel in the evening.

We chose to stay in a simple, cheap hotel over other nicer looking (and more expensive) hotels for the very important reason that it was the only that had free WiFi. Of course, in this getaway to the near corners of the earth, we were unable to disconnect ourselves from our laptops and internet… we’re messed up. I wanted my laptop so I can, for the first time in my life, keep a running blog/journal of a trip I consider most exciting.

The hotel was nice, simple and clean. Everything was going well until Tobia discovered that her laptop would not boot, despite different attempts to bring it to life. Her face said it all- this trip ain’t worth shit without a functioning laptop. I was sad for her, but short of offering her my laptop didn’t think I could do much. She must have spent an hour or two on my laptop reading up on how to resuscitate her hunk of junk. Eventually she got her laptop up and our trip was saved!