Honeymoon Day 5

Today we got up and headed down to breakfast. Quiche-of-the-day: quiche lorraine, which I had for dinner the night before. This quiche contains cheese and bacon. I loved it, and had two slices with two english muffins. I am now fatter than I was before.
On today's agenda we had a number of places to visit up north in the Fort Bragg area, about 10 minutes north of Mendocino. First we stopped at the Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens, which I thoroughly enjoyed ($7.50 per person admission). We discovered lots of things that we'd like to plant in our garden (rhododendrons and magnolias) when we have a garden. One neat thing is that they actually had a vegetable garden in the botanical gardens. They also had, on a bridge over a stream, a sign that read "No coins necessary to operate stream." apparently meant to combat coin-throwing-related problems.
We spent some time on the seacliff here too, trying to find us some whales. I think I may have seen a spray at one point, but we were never sure and the time spent ended up being unproductive. Oh well.
After this we went to the north side of town to visit Glass Beach. According to the website, this used to be a city dump, meaning that there is probably an incredible array of terribly nasty things there now. However, since it has been closed for three decades the beach is now pretty much all polished glass. Kind of neat, although not a real time sink. Plus, there was some sort of hobo camp gathering there, so we decided not to stick around too long. One of the hobos was being very mean to his dog too.
In town we got lunch at the Laurel Deli, which was sort of train-themed to go with the general terminus-of-the-Skunk-Train theme. The sandwiches (California Club for me, Vegetable Sandwich for Alison) were excellent, and we ate there for little more than $20! Apparently things in Fort Bragg are substantially less expensive than in Mendocino, although the town is also not quite as nice. If pressed, we could afford to live and eat in Fort Bragg, and spend all of our off-time in Mendocino hanging out at the headlands.
From lunch we headed north out of town to MacKerricher State Park. This park actually had somebody at the check-in station, but day use was free. Weird. This park is notable for the resident colony of Harbor Seals, as well as purported whale sightings. There is a whale skeleton next to the visitor center from a guy that just got tuckered out and washed up on shore.
First thing we headed down to the seal colony to check them out. I had never seen seals before, so I was pretty excited. Turns out that seals are about the laziest animals ever. They spent the whole time lying on the rocks, sometimes lifting their heads or moving an appendage. Once in a while one would get in the water, but they never did anything exciting. Good thing for them they're cute, or they'd have already been hunted out of existence for sure. We left the seal area to go to the beach, and headed south to the rocky beach section to look around.
Next we headed over to Lake Cleone, where we took a quick hike around it. Apparently, if I have followed the logic of the signage correctly, Lake Cleone is home to a herd of some sort of lake cow. Also, there was a bird there that we took some pictures of, since it was just hanging out on a lakeside branch checking us out.
After the lake we went back to the beach, where we followed the Haul Road north along the sandy part of the beach. The Haul Road used to be a railroad that evil loggers used to transport their ill-gotten gains to mills and such. This was a nice walk, and we just sort of ambled along and took some pictures. Aside from the road apples, we enjoyed it. At one point we came across a creek that was trying to make its way to the ocean. It terminated maybe 20 feet away, but was steadily moving down the beach. I took a movie of it, because the patterns were really interesting; it would be making slow forward progress in one part of its channel, then another part of the channel would start flowing and the first area would either stop making forward progress or actually start regressing. In any event, you could see the permeability of the sand on easy demonstration, as most of the creek water just disappeared.
After MacKerricher we bought gas (a CA-record low $2.999 per gallon) and headed back down to Mendocino to see about dinner. We went by Mendo Burger, which was closed until Wednesday, and to the Moosse Cafe, but discovered that it was also closed. Restaurants being closed the first part of the week is apparently very common in Mendocino. We ended up getting dinner at Tote Fete, a takeout place in town. I got a California Club (again), and Alison got a pesto, artichoke, and ?? sandwich. Reasonable prices because sandwiches were 50% off. We also got a twice-baked potato (way too much sour cream) and some butternut squash, which would have been better hot. After dinner we returned to the B&B and watched some more Office.