I like to drive my car.

[botias]

I got to pick up my tub in Honeydew. Honeydew is isolated. Eureka is already 200 miles from a decent Thai restaurant and you get on the freeway and leave it miles behind, then you turn off, drive through a bunch of old-growth redwoods and then you start to climb. Switchback up one side of a mountain, down the other, and then you're looking at a valley the color of new grass. There's a river weaving down the middle of it, and it's working the turquois thing.

So I picked up my tub, saw a new baby (my tip) and got a friendly mauling from their cattle dog.

I decided to take a different way home. There's a road that follows the valley to the ocean, than follows the coast more or less back the way I came. It turns out to be pleasantly twisty and turny, and the scenery is beautiful, yellow bushes and orange barked trees with light green leaves, dead, naked trees covered with lichen and big puff balls of mistletoe, rolling mountains and green pastures. The Pacific Ocean was awesome per usual, and that's right about where it got really fun. The coast is being uplifted here, so there is narrow strip of land, made up of what the ocean has worn off the bluffs and then there's the bluffs, which rise steeply up about 250 feet and so did the road, and for the next many miles it combined the ride of a roller coaster with the interactivity of a video game. As I negotiated the turns and felt my seatbelt grab and my ears pop I was pleased to think that I could do this and then go home and nurse my baby.