80 Days in America

When I woke up the first time this morning it was still dark, the second time the sun came up and I was happy to start another day. I didn’t see any native Americans last night, in fact fortunately no one disturbed my sleep 🙂 The bed in the back of my car isn’t so bad at all. When I drove to this place last night, in a flash I had seen a Starbucks-sign next to the freeway. So I turned back in that direction and just when I started to doubt if I had dreamt it, there it raised up like a spring in the dessert: some prove of civilization here in the middle of nowhere, thank God for Starbucks! (This isn’t a sponsored message, I just try to show how I happy I was to see my favorite coffee place).

I spend the rest of the morning in Starbucks doing some online work that needed to be done, doing some administration and updating the blog. Around noon I continued my journey, but not without a nice caramel frappuccino next to me 🙂 Ok, enough about the coffee now… The ride of today was really beautiful again. Highway 1 went over into highway 101, a slightly bigger freeway. I enjoyed being able to go a little faster from time to time, because I didn’t make so many miles yet in the past few days. Besides that it helped me making more miles today, it also gave a really good feeling to put the cruise control on 70 miles per hour and to lean back a bit. 😎 The roads here really made me think of an old video game that I played in my childhood, Need for Speed III, except for that I drive slower and saver these days of course. 😉

After a curtain time of driving I turned off to highway 254, also known as ‘Avenue of the Giants‘. Someone I met these days told me to take this route. It’s a touristic alternate for the highway 101 and as you can expect, there are a lot of big trees out there. In a small village next to the Avenue of the Giants I had my lunch and I did a small hike through the woods. There was also a fallen tree where you could climb on and in. There you could even better see how big those trees are. Although I’ve seen many of these trees the last days, it’s still very nice and interesting to see.

In the night I crossed the Redwoods National Park and saw my first small bear besides the road. It was only a moment of three seconds or so, but it was still nice to have seen my first bear 🙂 I hold myself from making the same mistake as yesterday by driving to long in the dark, but when I stopped in the last small village, I found out that life already stops here at eight. Sigh! At those moments I really miss a big city like New York where life never stops. Can you imagine: all restaurants closed at eight o’clock! In Italy for example the restaurants are just about to open at that time. Anyway, I bought myself some milk and cereal at the a tiny supermarket by a gas station and so I had breakfast food as diner, planning to have a big breakfast in the next town tomorrow morning. I first parked at a camping, but then some people came to tell me that I had to leave or pay 25 dollars to park there for the night. Fortunately they were so kind to also tell me where I could park for free, not so far from the camping. Behind an old supermarket, just around the corner I found a place to park my car. When I opened my laptop I was happily surprised that there was a public wifi connection here in the middle of nowhere! I spend the night watching a movie and skyping with a friend before I slept another good night in the back of my car.