We had a plan. It seemed at first the gods of traffic were arrayed against us.
We flew into Sacramento to attend a reunion, a convention, and start the next part of our vacation, which entailed renting a car and heading for the redwood forests along the northern California coast. We’d missed these on our previous trip to the area (2001) and vowed to come back one day to fill in the gap.
Everything went smoothly until we began to encounter the Other Season in California. (There are two seasons, we were told—winter and road construction.) We intend to take I5 to 101 and head north to Eureka. …