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Friday Night Halfway... in Garberville
Jul. 25th, 2025 09:19 pmNorth Coast Roadtrip travelog #1
Garberville · Fri, 25 Jul 2025, 9pm
After too many weekends frittering around home we're off tonight for an adventure weekend! Being the working stiffs we are... well, the working stiff I am... that means leaving after work on Friday and needing to be home Sunday night to return to work first thing Monday morning. And, to pack the weekend as much as possible, that means Friday Night Halfway! 🎵 Woah, we're halfway there! 🎵
But halfway where? That's hard to say as there's not any one place we're going this weekend. We aim to visit several. It's easier to say where we are. And where we are is Garberville.
Garberville? Yes, Garberville. A town of about 800 in Humboldt County, in the North Coast region of California.
It was a 245 mile drive from home in Sunnyvale. We pulled out of the garage at 2:15pm and arrived at our hotel for the night at about 8:15. The drive took 6 hours because of some slowdowns for traffic in San Francisco and Marin County, a quick stop for dinner in Cloverdale, a stop for snacks in Hopland, and then an unexpected stop at a rock-and-gem shop near Laytonville.
If the latter three place names elicit a reaction of "Where?" that's okay. They're all basically nowhere. Just dots on a map on US 101 in Northern California well north of San Francisco.
Anyway, 101 passes within a few miles of our house, and our hotel is just 1/4 mile off the highway some 245 miles further north. We didn't actually drive 101 all the way, though. You see, highway 101 through San Francisco is awful. We routed around it by exiting at the junction with Interstate 380 to Interstate 280 to 19th Street, rejoining 101 several miles later at the approach to the Golden Gate Bridge.
North of the bridge 101 is an 8- to 10-lane superhighway through much of Marin County. After several miles it narrows considerably, though, losing half or more of its lanes. Traffic ground to a near halt for miles through this section. Progress was even slower than driving San Francisco's city streets with stoplights every block.
North of Cloverdale, where we stopped for dinner, 101 turns into a canyon road. It leaves behind the broad valley north of the SF Bay and climbs up into the coast range mountains. Improvements to the highway over the past 20 years have made this stretch actually a very nice drive. It's a four lane divided highway with broad, sweeping curves instead of narrow slaloms.
Driving through these mountains in a convertible with the top down is a kind of weird experience. Every few minutes, it seemed, we drove through a cloud of marijuana smoke. There's a town in northern California named Weed; but this is the Emerald Triangle.
Keep reading: I've got pictures from the roadtrip in my next blog!
Garberville · Fri, 25 Jul 2025, 9pm
After too many weekends frittering around home we're off tonight for an adventure weekend! Being the working stiffs we are... well, the working stiff I am... that means leaving after work on Friday and needing to be home Sunday night to return to work first thing Monday morning. And, to pack the weekend as much as possible, that means Friday Night Halfway! 🎵 Woah, we're halfway there! 🎵
But halfway where? That's hard to say as there's not any one place we're going this weekend. We aim to visit several. It's easier to say where we are. And where we are is Garberville.
Garberville? Yes, Garberville. A town of about 800 in Humboldt County, in the North Coast region of California.
It was a 245 mile drive from home in Sunnyvale. We pulled out of the garage at 2:15pm and arrived at our hotel for the night at about 8:15. The drive took 6 hours because of some slowdowns for traffic in San Francisco and Marin County, a quick stop for dinner in Cloverdale, a stop for snacks in Hopland, and then an unexpected stop at a rock-and-gem shop near Laytonville.
If the latter three place names elicit a reaction of "Where?" that's okay. They're all basically nowhere. Just dots on a map on US 101 in Northern California well north of San Francisco.
Road Trip 101
Our drive this evening was virtually all on highway US 101. You may have heard it called "The 101". That is true; it is called The 101. But that's in Southern California. Up here it's just "101" or "Highway 101".Anyway, 101 passes within a few miles of our house, and our hotel is just 1/4 mile off the highway some 245 miles further north. We didn't actually drive 101 all the way, though. You see, highway 101 through San Francisco is awful. We routed around it by exiting at the junction with Interstate 380 to Interstate 280 to 19th Street, rejoining 101 several miles later at the approach to the Golden Gate Bridge.
North of the bridge 101 is an 8- to 10-lane superhighway through much of Marin County. After several miles it narrows considerably, though, losing half or more of its lanes. Traffic ground to a near halt for miles through this section. Progress was even slower than driving San Francisco's city streets with stoplights every block.
North of Cloverdale, where we stopped for dinner, 101 turns into a canyon road. It leaves behind the broad valley north of the SF Bay and climbs up into the coast range mountains. Improvements to the highway over the past 20 years have made this stretch actually a very nice drive. It's a four lane divided highway with broad, sweeping curves instead of narrow slaloms.
Driving through these mountains in a convertible with the top down is a kind of weird experience. Every few minutes, it seemed, we drove through a cloud of marijuana smoke. There's a town in northern California named Weed; but this is the Emerald Triangle.
Keep reading: I've got pictures from the roadtrip in my next blog!
