trip to Etna - part I

so the trip started on Thursday morning... with slight problems already - car rental place forgot to pick us up and they also lost our reservation :( luckily we got that figured out in less than hour. so next we had breakfast and then Jana took me to see the facilities they have on the bay area for the school.

we left the city around 1pm. we drove and drove and drove... the distances are just mad long here... and the road (#101) was not particularly interesting, after some 4 hours of driving we turned off to go to see the ocean. oh boy... first we had trouble finding the road itself.. then once we happily saw the first sign towards Honeydew we stopped by the road to take some pictures of the huuuge redwoods (no idea if that is how they really call the trees, it is called redwood forest. those things are huge.. I also don't know if sequoias are different type or not.. anyhoo they are both humongous trees and very common here).. and then the fun started.. the road was soo narrow and windy that we had to go about 20 mph, it was constantly either climbing the hill or coming down.. i bet if we would have gone any faster i would have gotten sick.. it was like never ending roller coaster :) ... and it "only" took us some 1,5 hours to get to the ocean... and then we still had to make it back to road 101.. another hour driving to the skies and back.. literally.. we drove through the clouds :) it was a nice detour.. but neither of us had imagined it takes so long. and i don't even want to know what we would have done if something happened to the car.. all we saw were some lonely cows up in the mountains.

by the time we got back on the road we figured that we won't be making it to Etna today... so we arrived in Eureka.. found out that most of the hotels are fully booked and there is nothing to see in the movie theater... so we went to have a nice dinner instead :) took the local paper and started to call some hotels.. found the last double room from one :) ... after the dinner maneuvered ourselves there through the one ways... arrived at the parking lot... turned the car around and boom.. there goes the tire... passenger side rear tire blew up.. great! it was past 10pm... but we figured to deal with it in the morning.

thank you for all your comments!
Yes, Oliver this is the correct town :)- i'll have pictures up about the trip there and the town itself soon .. and yes we were just wondering of how they have no imagination and every state has the same town names .. including famous European cities :) The pictures are taken with Canon PowerShot S3 IS that I purchased just a week before i left.. i bought a used one and it is working like a charm.. i don't know all the buttons yet (that is why many pictures are duplicated ;) )
All the others - nice to hear from you.

- oh and just a note, i'm writing the posts at a later time but will set the post date and time to when events happened.. so i don't have to keep track of the dates while writing.