Highway to Hell: Meghan Cogswell
With Christmas over and New Year’s Eve one day away, my boyfriend Dan and I decided it was time to head north, back up to our newly adopted hometown of Arcata, in California’s North Coast region.
We had done the 297-mile drive on Hwy 101 from San Mateo to Arcata a number of times in the last six months and we were looking forward to it. The drive samples California’s many types of landscape, from spectacular vistas of the San Francisco Bay, to stretches through the oak and savannah-like areas of the wine country and up to the rugged and mountainous redwood regions. The drive also has wonderful little oddities sprinkled throughout it. In Leggett there is the Drive-Thru Tree, in Piercy there is Confusion Hill, near Richardson’s Grove State Park there is the Famous One-Log House, and so on and so on. These strange and splendid roadside attractions are not only fun to visit for those who are into the truly weird and tacky, but they also create a sort of yellow brick road that takes you into that mythical land where Big Foot roams, the rains fall all year round and the tallest trees in the world grow: Humboldt County.
Dan was at the helm of our vessel and I was navigator. Our 1991 Honda Accord Wagon was filled to the brim with luggage, Christmas presents and a cooler packed with ice and frozen food from our favorite grocery store in the world, Trader Joe’s (yes, we went home to visit family, friends and to stock up on our favorite goodies we couldn’t find in Humboldt County). We pulled out of my parents’ driveway at 3pm, a later start than we would have liked, but we figured that we could finish the five hour and a half hour drive before the storm front the weathermen had been predicting was to blow through. So off we went, not knowing all the trouble that lay before us.
Our drive through San Francisco turned out to be quite easy, and we got to see a romantic sunset while on the Golden Gate Bridge, but as darkness fell, giant raindrops began to splatter on our windshield. So much for beating the storm. I could sense Dan was annoyed, so I tried to keep the mood light by DJ-ing as best I could on the car radio. Two hours into the drive the raindrops turned into torrents and an ominous road sign warned us that 70-something miles ahead 101 was closed at Confusion Hill.