Fern Canyon and Pacific We made it!Ocean! and other exciting things day

This morning I started out at a diner, where I posted about Crater Lake, and checked my email. I couldn't do any more than that, because there was only one outlet, and it wasn't where I was. I LOVE diners, and this even had massive charm, and this is not a good venue for a review.

BUT...... Worcester does diners right! You show up and boom, when the waitress shows up, she asks "regular or decaf" not "would you like coffee? hold on (for 10 minutes) I'll go get some." Plus, this was the first sit down restaurant I've ever been in, where they only had non-dairy powdered creamer. WHAT! So no pictures of that.

Instead, we went on an unbelieveble hike in fern canyon. Even getting there was an adventure:

 1. We drove through really dirty woods to get there, how weird! All the leaves were actually filthy, probably drought related (the cars kick up huge dust clouds as they drive by)

 2: Then the road looked like this: This was just the first of three stream crossings we had to do.

 3. Then we had to take the bike path:

To.... WOW! Ferns everywhere. Lush drought-ignoring ferns!

This canyon was just a few yards from the ocean, which came with it's own interesting (very miniscule) flora:

 

 and fauna:

YES.... those are elk!

Because of the elk on the beach, we were not going to walk to the ocean, but how can you be this close and not touch the water. We drove down a few more miles, and jumped out and ran:

We made it!

I know we said we were on the way home, but NOW i feel like we really are! We are heading back from the West coast!

Our car celebrated with us. We hit a very special "mile"stone together:

 

At the campground that evening, I did laundry, hung it up, and then played my trusty viola among the sequoias, and Theodore took a picture. He's getting better at framing, since he can now better hold the camera up.