Fort Bragg- the vistas, the beach and the drive home!

 The Fort Bragg trip was turning out way more awesome than expected!  As we went through in the previous posts, Chico and our awesome family, Glass Beach, the Skunk Train, Cabrillo lighthouse, and Mendocino were highlights!

The last half of Saturday, we went to the Mendocino Botanical Gardens (https://www.gardenbythesea.org/visit/).  Botanic gardens are always so beautiful!  Always designed to teach about the local plant life and usually so full of flowers, you are in awe!  This garden was no exception!  It was filled with rhodedendrons!  Bushes so full of flowers in every color imaginable!  Truly beautiful!  Plus they have a trail through a bit of forest to cliffs overlooking the sea!  Definitely worth a visit!

The flowers grow on the cliff side just above the crashing waves!  Really amazing!!!

The north coast is known for well, the coast!!!  Our final day we drove home on Highway 1 to Bodega Bay before heading inland.  No post of the north coast would be complete without pictures of the coast😂😍.  So here are pictures in Fort Bragg and on the way to Bodega Bay.  The Coast is amazing!!! It took us 6 hours of slow windy roads to get to Bodega Bay!!!  I recommend you take it slow and stop as much as you want.  Something this beautiful needs to be savored!!!  Here are just a few!  Hard to choose from a couple hundred😂

The grasslands around the cliffs and beaches are thick with grass and flowers!!!!

Point Reyes! (https://www.nps.gov/pore/index.htm) and the lighthouse!! (https://www.nps.gov/pore/planyourvisit/lighthouse.htm)

Definitely worth a stop, and takes about 45 minutes to an hour to see well.  Awesome light house!  And the cliffs and sea must be walked!

   One of the many reasons we planned this trip was a burning desire to visit Bodega Bay!!!!  Although one friend had said there's not much to see, I didn't believe them!  I knew there would be a corner by the diner with a phone booth, a cute street where terrified children ran, and tons of other memorabilia!!

Turns out, the phone booth was a prop in a sound stage.  The street was real- but they filmed it and projected it in a sound stage and children ran on a tread mill.  The cafe burned down in the 80's is now an indistinct wharf restaurant.  I shall stop here.  But we found a few things, and had excellent fish and chips at the Boat House!

And that concludes our trip to Fort  Bragg!  On the way home, we stopped to visit Diana and Al in Livermore.  The drive, including stops, was long.  We left Fort Bragg at 10:15 am and arrived home at 9:30 pm!  But a great trip it was!!!