I would love to make it but we are going to be out of town that weekend.
Speaking of road trips, the boys and I went on our first off-road adventure last weekend. We drove Fish Rock Rd from Highway 128 in Boonville, CA to Route 1 in Gualula, CA. It's a 25 mile road through the mountains, ~15 miles of which are unpaved. I chose this easy route from URL="http://www.trails.com/tcatalog_trail.aspx?trailid=HGS240-017"]trails.com[/URL] because I have never been off road, was travelling with my kids, was travelling without any other vehicles, and had owned my vehicle for just one week.
We loaded up the Disco with our camping gear (soooo much more room in this than the MINI), and took off on Saturday morning.
Our first stop was O'Reilly auto parts to pick up a fire extinguisher (just in case), and jumper cables. Now I realize picking up jumper cables when you are going off road by yourself is kind of dumb. Did I expect to get a jump from a tree? In any rate, I can put the cables in my girlfriend's car when I find the proper solution for overlanding.
Next stop was REI for an AMK Weekender Medical kit. Feeling at least somewhat prepared for a minor emergency, we popped on the Land Rover G4 Challenge podcast for a little inspiration and took to the highway. After struggling through traffic on 101 until just north a Petaluma, we finally made the cutoff for Hwy 128 in Cloverdale around 2pm. We passed Fish Rock Rd and drove 7 miles further into downtown Boonville to fill up on gas before circling back to start the route.
Fish Rock Rd is paved through Mailliard Redwoods State Reserve. It really is a gorgeous road to drive with either redwoods on ranches on either side. A few miles later we ceremoniously raised the suspension and set the traffic control to gravel as we passed the sign saying "Pavement Ends"
Now I know that many cars could drive this road with no problems, but it was still exciting for me, and most importantly, the kids were having a blast. There were a few epic views worthy of photographs, but most of the time we used the GoPro to document our adventure.
The land on either side of the road was always fenced off with no trespassing signs so we drove straight through to Gualala, which took about 1 1/2 hours.
Look, Ma. Real dirt!
From there we headed southwards down the coast looking for a place to camp. In addition to being new to overlanding, we are new to camping, having only done it a few times before. The first 2 places we checked were full, but the ranger recommended Woodside a few miles futher down the road. Success! We pulled into Woodside Camp grounds in Salt Point State Park around 5:30pm. Ruben and I cooked Chef Boy R'Dee raviolis over the campfire while Simon set up the tent. Simon's verdict on Chef Boy R' Dee was "like nothing my tongue has ever tasted." I
think he meant this in a good way. In any rate, we followed up dinner with toasted marshmallows and hot chocolate before turning in for the night.
The next morning we made Mancakes (pancakes with bacon in them thanks Expedition Overland!) before packing up camping and driving home down the coast. We were all really pleased about our first fun - and thankfully uneventful - adventure and or looking forwards to getting further off the beaten path.