Wednesday, October 10, 2018

Day 26 - Avenue of the Giants

We are continuing to stay at the Richardson Grove RV Park and we backtracked about 45 miles to the north entrance of the Avenue of the Giants. This is a scenic road that parallels Hwy 101 for about 30 miles or so and winds through multiple groves of giant redwood trees. About halfway through, we stopped at the visitors center at Humbolt Redwoods State Park. This was taken in front of the visitors center looking north.

There was a short nature loop trail across the street. It was challenging to find the trail as there wasn't a lot of undergrowth. I liked the hollow center of this root ball. And this shows how shallow the root system of these massive trees are. They don't go very deep.

Fill-in flash was used as it would've been a long-ish exposure even in the middle of the day. Using ISO 400, it would've been 1/6th of a second. There were a couple of other visitors measuring the circumference of some of the trees looking for the largest one that they could get to. I believe they said that this one was 65 feet.

It is hard to really for any picture to get the size of these trees. Kind of like a picture of the Grand Canyon ends up looking like a painting. No sense of depth. We did stop at the drive-through tree but they wanted $8 for the privilege of driving through. We didn't go there. We did end up giving the state $7 to park at the picnic area. BTW, this is the most we've spent on diesel. It's about the same as the Yukon Territory at $4.16/gallon. I'm told that there are a lot of taxes...

This log "RV" was on display in the visitors center. It was carved out of a single 22' section of a log back in 1917 or thereabouts. It is mounted on a Nash chassis with solid rubber tires on solid iron wheels.

Here is a photo of a display giving a little more information about the Travel-Log.

Now, on to a completely unrelated topic. This is the first time since I took the RV out of storage that the solar panels were unshaded for part of the day. Until this campground, we were always under a lot of trees. Here, there is shade for most of the day but we received full sun in the morning. And the batteries were fully charged by mid-morning. 

8 comments:

  1. Wow your solar panels charge up the batteries fast! As to CA taxes on fuel, yep, they're there....another reason to not live there. If my family wasn't there, not sure I'd go there at all. You're right re it being tough to picture tall subjects like the trees or the Grand Canyon....

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    1. The panels get them up to about 98% pretty quickly then the charge controller switches to absorption and that last 2% takes several hours. I had heard that the fuel prices here were exorbitant but it’s more than expected.

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  2. The trees are ever so impressive. I'm heading over to see if Bridget has more pics for me ;-)

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  3. Wow, I can't wait to see the giants! Next year...

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  4. It will be late summer into fall 2019, possibly staying west all winter.

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