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When we woke in the morning we couldn't decide whether to stay at the KOA since we had arrived too late the night before to check anything out or if we should continue up Highway 1 like we had originally planned. In the end we decided to continue on since the KOA would be easier to come back to than places north.

The day worked out well considering we had very little plans. When we saw something worth checking out we checked it out. After lunch in Mendocino we headed up to Fort Bragg to visit Glass Beach. I had known I wanted to check out Fort Bragg without knowing much about it because it is a town that gets listed on freeway mile markers a lot. I am kept ever aware of how many miles I am from Fort Bragg, I might as well finally visit the place. When I sent out a Facebook request for suggestions of places to visit everyone came back with Glass Beach in Fort Bragg.

The story goes that years ago the city dumps caught on fire and rather than put it out it was just shoved into the ocean, resulting in all of the glass scattered around the beaches. I have no idea how true it is, and the glass beach is purportedly nothing like it used to be when the place was absolutely covered in sea glass but I had never seen anything like it. The above photo is the glass I brought up in one handful. The beach was a spectacular surprise.

I hadn't realized that when Highway 1 ended it joined 101. It happened to join 101 in a part that we travel often, and which was only about two hours from home. It seemed almost comical to have been driving a large portion of two days and end up only a couple hours from home. We stopped just before Garberville and checked out the touristy redwood spots, where Z got himself a new alpaca hat. The woman at the tourist trap told me a story about the hat being woven by hand in some far off part of the world, but I'm sure it was made in the part of China where all of Z's other hats come from.

By the time we were done playing tourist it was getting dark so we decided to get a camp site in nearby Richardson Grove. We had been hoping to find somewhere to grab dinner but our options were extremely limited. In the end, in the interest of time, we ended up at the gas station nearby. We brought our delicious meal of frozen burritos back to camp and settled in for the night.