Day 5 - Bodega Bay

We wake at a reasonable hour, feeling much better than we had feared after the previous day’s shenanigans. Ceese and Zac have thought of everything, though, and have Gatorade ready to rehydrate us and fix any elements of a hangover. Will and Morgan surface, and prepare to meet Morgan’s mum for lunch: Will’s impressive ability to surface as if the previous night was spent drinking tea and playing Monopoly wins again!

While Will and Morgan head off, we jump in the car with Zac and Ceese who tell us they’d like to take us to the beach. Ooooh! The beach in California! We see this in movies! En-route, we even drive through a remote hamlet which Alfred Hitchcock used as the location for The Birds. The church, sitting on a hill under an angry sky, has a distinctly unwelcoming feel about it and the curious house behind it seems other-worldly.  The lone pub in town, though, with its sign claiming to be a casino is just plain weird!

However, the California beach in movies is much further south: up where we are is damp and foggy; there’s a rugged beauty to the landscape as a rather angry Pacific Ocean smashes granite cliffs and outcrops. Rock pools contain massive numbers of crabs and star fish, and a host of small crustaceans cling to the rock before the tide comes in for another go.

Bodega Bay where we go is an old hippy haunt, full of shops selling mystical stones and toy windmills, and does a superb job at proving California’s coastline is not all about teeth and tans. The surfers on the beach are also not your stereotypical Californian surfer dudes. Zipped snugly inside their wetsuits, they noticeably shiver as they pad their way back to the car park after riding the impressive breakers. We try to get a table at a local dive-bar for some highly recommended food, but the entire place is taken over with a 4th-of-July-weekend meeting of classic bikers. Instead we head further into the town and eat at a seafood restaurant on the bay. We see two seals playing about in the water before heading back to Zac’s place, where we give Ceese a big hug goodbye and head back to Folsom with Will who is fresh back from a successful lunch.