Van Damme and MacKerricher State Parks

After a long day of driving, we made it to the Pacific Coast!  There's a bunch of little parks and pulloffs all around here where you can go down to the water -- we stopped at one right away!  The Pacific seems a lot more dangerous than the Atlantic -- the cliffs are bigger, the waves look bigger, and there are lots of "DANGER" signs.  The cliffs are really pretty though!

This is where we stopped when we first hit the ocean

The cliffs are really pretty!

We had been hoping to stay in Jackson State Forest, just outside of Fort Bragg, but most of the campgrounds were closed, and the only open one was back a ways, so we kept going, and ended up at Van Damme State Park.  (There are a bunch of state parks around here -- I think there were three within five miles of each other!)

The beach at Van Damme

Van Damme was nice -- my parents and I took a ride through the woods over to a pygmy forest, which is where the soil is really acidic, so all the trees are really short.  They were really dense though, it was kinda crazy!

We were also right by the ocean, so we walked around out there a bit.  There was a nice hiking trail back in the woods also, we did a little bit of that.  Mendocino is a cute little town nearby, and there's a little park out there that you can walk around out on.

After two days at Van Damme, we headed north to MacKerricher State Park.  We went through Fort Bragg, and got some groceries and Internet.  (It's a pretty big town, much larger than I thought.)  We also stopped at a glass beach, which was cool.

The glass beach

We arrived at MacKerricher, just a few miles north of Fort Bragg, later in the day, but we still had time to get set up and explore around a bit.

There's a bike trail that runs from the state park south to the park where the glass beach is, that was a nice ride.  We also explored around on the beach some.

The beach at MacKerricher

On our last day at the park, we went back into town a bit, then drove north to a really pretty pull-off off of the highway, right by a cliff.  It was kinda surreal, and super pretty!