May 30, 2013

Yreka, CA

Something unexpected occurred that changed our travel plans to Boise, ID.

We have accepted a volunteer tour guide position at Cape Blanco Lighthouse in Port Orford, OR.

We had to put in a marathon travel day because we were 550 miles away from our destination. 

 

 

 

 

 

I had been concerned about the types of roads we would have to travel on but they all turned out to be great both in views and in the condition of the roads.

 

 

  

 

We passed through a Department of Agriculture check-point

 

 

 

 

 

 and had a 20 minute road construction delay.

 

 

 

 

 

 

After stopping for lunch at a rest area we were on our way again

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 passing more spectacular views.

 

 

 

 

 

 Monte needed fuel and I decided to top off at the same time.

$150-Ouch

Once we reached I-5, we started looking for a place to spend the night.  We found a Walmart that allows overnight parking and thanked them by purchasing groceries.

 

 

 

 

I was in the mood for pizza and found a great place in the historic area of Yreka, CA. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The pizza was awesome. 

 After dinner we took a walk around the town.  I just love these small towns steeped in history.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I found an amusing story on how the town got its name.  According to Wikipedia,

In March 1851 Abraham Thompson, a mule train packer, discovered gold near Rocky Gulch while traveling along the Siskiyou Trail from southern Oregon. This discovery sparked the California Gold Rush from California's Sierra Nevada into Northern California. By April 1851, 2,000 miners had arrived in "Thompson's Dry Diggings" to test their luck, and by June 1851, a gold rush "boomtown" of tents, shanties, and a few rough cabins had sprung up. Several name changes occurred until the little city was called Yreka. The name comes from the Shasta /wáik'a/, for which Mount Shasta is named.^[2] The word means "north mountain" or "white mountain".^[3][4] Mark Twain, in his Autobiography, first published in 1906, (p. 162, Harper/Perennial Literary, 1990), tells a different story:

Harte had arrived in California in the [eighteen-]fifties, twenty-three or twenty-four years old, and had wandered up into the surface diggings of the camp at Yreka, a place which had acquired its mysterious name — when in its first days it much needed a name — through an accident. There was a bakeshop with a canvas sign which had not yet been put up but had been painted and stretched to dry in such a way that the word BAKERY, all but the B, showed through and was reversed. A stranger read it wrong end first, YREKA, and supposed that that was the name of the camp. The campers were satisfied with it and adopted it.