Day 3 (updated)

We started the day off with a continental breakfast at our motel and got on the road right away. We continued down 101 to the Redwoods National Park where, in addition to crazy-big trees, there are crazy amounts of elk. We drove by one person's yard where there were a few just laying around in the lawn like dogs would. All in all we probably saw 60-70 elk, two herds of which were pretty large.
We checked out the visitor's center before heading into the park. Neat place, but almost bordering on creepy with all the taxidermy... what was really cool was a great big chunk of a redwood tree that had the antlers of an elk embedded in it. Apparently a looong time ago some unfortunate elk must have gotten his antlers caught in a knot in the wood or something, died, and over the next while (hundreds of years?.. it didn't say) the wood grew around the antlers. Awesome! I imagine the hiker who eventually discovered walked by and happened to notice it must have been pretty surprised.
Anyway, at the park we planned on doing a 1 mile hike in, 1 mile hike out - short, I know, but we also planned on making it to a KOA campground south of Sacramento in a town named Lodi so we had to stay on track. We set off on our hike and were immediately dumbfounded by the sheer scale of everything. We took our time and seemed to only be able to walk from tree to tree examining each one, taking photos, and discussing how amazing they were... so we were completely surprised when we happened upon a sign with a mile mark that said we had gone 2.4 miles. Oops!


We turned around at that point and hurried (as much as possible for us in the land of giant trees) back to our truck to get back on the road. We ended up being an hour behind schedule but we figured the loss of time was well worth it for the experience.
Back in the truck, we set off again down the coast to Arcata where we caught the CA-299 towards Redding through the Trinity National Forest. Thankfully this has been a mild winter in that part of the state, so we managed to avoid snow covered passes and could focus on enjoying the scenery. As we were making our way out of the mountains and towards the valley, we noticed an older lady attempting to flag down a passing car. She had gotten a flat tire and had been trying to get a passing car to stop for sometime, so we gave her a ride to the next town (if you could even call it that). On the way, she told us a little bit about the area (and the unusually mild winter they were having) and wished us luck on our travels. Once we left the mountains we began to notice the changing landscape (i.e. Palm trees and shrubs) and we felt like we had definitely left the northwest. We caught I-5 in Redding, CA, and 4.5 hours later (and a total of 600 miles for the day) we were south of Sacramento in a small town named Lodi searching for a place to stay for the night. Our hopes of camping for cheap at a KOA Campground quickly faded when we learned that the tent sites were closed due to mud (and flooding?) so we bit the bullet and spent the extra money to get an actual hotel room. On Thursday we're heading to SW California to spend the night in the Mojave Desert, so hopefully we don't get eaten by coyotes or stung by too many scorpions before we can finally make it out of California and head to Arizona!