Vacation 2005 – Tuesday, August 23

Breakfast at the B&B was fantastic! He had a huge meal, and everything was really, really good. There were only a few guests around, so they were cooking individual meals to order, rather than buffet-style. Great sausage, great frittata, great preserves, great fruit, and real corned-beef hash. Fantastic!! One of the 2 other people in the restaurant at the same time turned out also to be from NYC and we out here for a wedding (in Santa Cruz) and was on his way to Portland, OR to visit friends before flying back home (lower east side). Pretty funny that his trip was mirroring ours, except that he needed to be in Portland by Wednesday, and Cheryl and I were not going to get to Salem until Saturday night.

We went down to the beach since there was no fog and got some neat pictures. I got my feet into the ocean (cold!) and we also spotted a dead beast on the shore. Looked like it may have been an elephant seal. Didn’t want to get too close. Probably washed up on shore.

We headed north for the day to Mendocino, and we walked around the town and snapped pictures. Had a peanut butter truffle there, which I managed to spill onto the camera and my shirt and not notice until an hours later after it had been rubbed into my shirt. We then drove up to Fort Bragg and toured the botanical gardens. They were neat, and we got in some good exercise walking their grounds (45 acres). We then traveled inland through Boonville, and finally made it to Ukiah were we stopped at an old Mill that was still in operation. We had a chocolate chip cookie each and used their restrooms. Next we started back to Elk, and had picked our course when we spotted an unmarked road with a sign pointing to it saying “Elk, 19 Miles”. So we took it. Lots of winding around later, it dumped us about 50 feet from the driveway to our B&B, saving us lots of miles and time. Perfect!! Sometimes things really work out well.

For dinner we went to Café Beaujolais, which had been recommended both by my boss’ boss and Cheryl’s Aunt Janice. The food was really, really good. We did find out that they are no longer open for breakfast. We then drove out to the water and watched the sunset, before driving back to the Inn.