#164 Cloverdale Ca Citrus fairgrounds 2 nights Friday and sat did PCH Cloverdale loop

After Olema, we went to the citrus fairgrounds in Cloverdale California.

It was the 2-hour hop going north. I have been reading a good bit about California Highway 1 going north from San Francisco.

It's one of those things that it's fun to drive in a sports car put a little terrifying to drive in a big rig.

I looked at it and read a lot and decided to drop the rig somewhere and do a big loop and we do this twice so the first one was here I decided to call up the Cloverdale Loop and these turned out to be like an all-day event the second one we be north of us and I called it the Leggett Loop.

Just to make it easy to see I went ahead and saved some screenshots of what we did and it's kind of like this.

Day 1

Day2

We left Cloverdale and drove about half an hour down to Santa Rosa over to Bodega down to and along the Point Rey’s National Seashore over to Petaluma then back on Highway 101 to Santa Rosa then of course back to the fairgrounds.

I certainly didn't know it before we started the whole event but when we stopped at Bodega California, we saw a cool old church that had a historical type sign. I started reading and found out that this was the church where Alfred Hitchcock filmed The Birds. It would have playground monkey bars and this is where all the birds started landing on the monkey bars and where the kids were held up in the church for a while.

I like it when you're driving along the seashore and you see the most interesting things. It's not like there's this one thing that made it incredible, it was just a pretty drive.

I was riding by someone's home where they formed a fence by using a bunch of trees in a line to act as fence posts. The trees were very mature so rather than having fence posts they had these giant trees acting like sort of a living fence. They will wobble and move around a bit because they're alive but you can't have everything.

We stopped at a place called The Point Arena Lighthouse. Down below on the beach we some sea lions basking in the sun. I've never seen that. To the California people that ain't no big deal but I kind of liked it.

Towards the northern part of the loop on the ocean side was a little town called Manchester. I enjoyed the way they had groomed the trees there in two very strange-like flat cylinders. Some were groomed to resemble animals.

Near Manchester, I located the oldest Garage in America.

Maybe I should say the oldest gas station. It's called the Elks garage and opened in 1901. We met the present owner who operated it as Queenies Roadhouse Café.

Keep in mind that Henry Ford just got his world started up around 1900 and there were no highways but there was the garage right here.

What we took on was a pretty big undertaking and it took two separate road trips. Today was kind of like going from Cloverdale West straight to the ocean and then up to Manchester and then down around back to Cloverdale again.

We would do the other one from our next stop I will call the Leggett loop.

Across from the fairgrounds, we saw an interesting home where the front had kind of a Charleston South Carolina entrance. It was designed to keep the women on the left and the men on the right so they wouldn't be tempted to see their naked ankles as they ascended the stairs. Seeing a woman's naked ankle in 1760 would compare to seeing a lady in a barley bikini in the modern era.

There was a very cool swirling brick chimney that I liked a lot. It was just some really good brickwork that I admired.

On day one of the loop as we finished up, we're approaching the end of the tour at a town called Petaluma.

As we got kind of close we were very much out in the country. I saw some cows huddled together and I got such a big kick out of it. For all, I know they could have been a feeding or watering station but from the road, it looks like they were just huddled tightly and for no good reason. It seemed their grazing area was like a hundred acres that they could have wandered around anywhere and yet they were all huddled tightly together in a group.

I named it the secret meeting of the cows. With my vivid imagination, I decided it was a meeting to conspire against the oppressive enslavement by humans. They were strategizing on how to get away and how best to destroy their keepers.

They eventually had to table the discussion on how-to take-out Farmer John. Most of them wanted to do it on a Tuesday afternoon as he wouldn't notice when he was busy working.

As we rode through Petaluma I saw on a street corner a giant electrical outlet about 12 feet tall. I found the website on how it was made and installed.

http://protagonist4hire.blogspot.com/2015/07/a-giant-outlet-in-downtown-petaluma.html?m=1

In the years after our visit, there have been some major fires in California. One day when I was watching the news and Petaluma was one of the places badly burned some areas burned to the ground. Displaced people were just living out in tents and RVs out in a field. It made me sad and then I wondered if the wildfires had been intentionally set by the Secret meeting of the Cows.

Sometimes fairgrounds are a beautiful grassy wonderland. Cloverdale was just a fenced-in asphalt parking lot.

That's where we were and it was fine but nothing fancy about it.