California's coastal highway

September 6, coastal highway

The scenery on the coastal road is breath taking, windy and cool, 60 degrees. We visited Fort Ross, home of a Russian Fort and Bodega, where the Hitchcock film the “Birds” was filmed.
Fort Ross State Historic Park winds along a steep ocean bluff. From 1812 to 1841, the fort was home to a thriving multi-cultural settlement of Russians, Native Alaskans, Californians and Creoles (mixed races). The community served as an agricultural base to supply Russian settlements in Alaska, as a center for fur trappers who came in search of valuable otter and seal pelts, as well as to establish a trading post and protect their turf from the Spanish. The fort includes warehouses, a chapel, dwellings, cannons, a stockade and workshops all furnished as the might have been in the fort’s heyday. I loved the hand hued wood, and wide floor boards (redwoods) and the artifacts.
Next we looked for a place to have lunch. We were just outside of Jenner and we pulled into a little restaurant on the Russian River expecting seafood, but what we got was an Indian Restaurant, the Sizzling Tandoor. A Tandoor is a huge clay oven fueled to intense heat by mesquite charcoal. I don’t recall the names of what we had, it was chicken, and it was good and a pleasant surprise.
Next we drove to the little village of Bodega. The ride there was more interesting than the town.
Our next stop was Luther Burbank’s Gold Ridge Experimental Farm. In 1885, Luther Burbank purchased a cottage and a total of 18 acres of farmland west of Sebastopol. He conducted most of his plant breeding experiments there. We walked around part of the farm with a numbered pamphlet seeing all the hybrid plants he introduced and even tasting a apple from the tree and some black berries. Then we drove to Sebastopol were we stopped for dessert.
I don’t ever want to see another windy and twisty road again. The coastal road is gorgeous but the turns made me car sick.