We drove North from Mendocino and kept going until Highway 1 disappeared and then we turned inland and back through the redwood forests and continued further East and North and a little West then some North again followed by some East... you get the picture, a rather circuitous route, hugging the sides of mountains and running alongside of rivers and more beautiful scenery than you could shake a stick at. Blair and Pete, who were an hour ahead of us in the equipment truck, saw a large pod of whales heading up the coast.

This is the part of California that rarely gets talked about. We all know about Southern California and when we talk about Northern California we are usually talking about San Francisco and wine country. But there is another several hundred miles of wilderness once you leave Mendocino County. And it is surprisingly frontier-like. A place to go when you want to hide, disappear or just lose touch with the modern world. It has a similar feel to Alaska. Arcata itself is a very funky little town filled with the occasional lumberjack, an unfortunate handful of meth-heads, and lots and lots of hippies. Humboldt College is here as well so add in to the mix lots of college kids. I didn't spot a single franchise in the whole downtown; all locally run coffee shops, cafes, bookstores, surf/skate shops and the like. Very, very funky. We stayed right on the downtown square at the Arcata Hotel which could be quite a spectacular place with about 10 million dollars of renovations. It has definitely seen better days and those days were about eighty years ago. Not a whole lot has been done to keep it up. It was a little on the stinky side and, I think, a little haunted.

The gig tonight was at a small theater on campus. It was sold out which is always a nice surprise when you come to a new town and a town as isolated as is this place. We had a decent night. Not great, but not terrible. The audience felt a little distant and we felt like we never really connected with them. There were definitely a handful of hardcores there, but it felt like the majority of the audience was sight-seeing and we chased a number of them from the theater early in the show.