MacKerricher State Park – A “Breaker” Kind of Day

After church we got a couple of burgers from Jenny’s Giant Burgers (Home of the best burgers along the Mendocino Coastline, and you’ll get no argument from me, they are good) and headed the few miles north to MacKerricher State Park to eat and take in the view…not a bad lunch view at all….  The park is about 7 miles long along the coast from Fort Bragg to seven miles north.  The entrance is about 3 miles north of Fort Bragg, but the roads only encompass the center portion of the park which includes a nice overlook of the pacific where there is a boardwalk type of path going out to Laguna Point.  The path is ADA accessible, so I got the GoGo Scooter and out and off we went. 

The day was not a bright and sunny as yesterday, but it was a comfortable 65 degrees, a bit cooler perhaps out at the end of the boardwalk….but I wasn’t cold in shorts and t-shirt, my normal attire since retirement.  And I will fess up about this shot….I was centering on the boat out in the ocean, waiting for a wave to break, and the bird…well, sometimes you are just in the right place at the right time with camera in hand.

  

  

It did not take me long before I knew today’s theme would be the water breaking on the rocks.  There were so many shots, so many opportunity for shots, how could one resist???

    

Above is a look to the south (left picture) and a view to the north (right picture) from the end of the boardwalk out on Laguna Point.  What we did not see was the seals that they say “are normally around”, well, not today.

We left the park and headed north along highway 1 for perhaps 10 miles.  That’s when we saw this huge whale coming out of the ocean!  Ok, just joking, it is just a rock that looks like the head of a whale.

We headed back south, through Fort Bragg (where we got some gas at $3.95) and found a nice turnout as we approached the town of Mendocino.

Above we are looking back at Point Cabrillo.  The lighthouse below is the lighthouse in the upper right corner of the picture above.

That lighthouse picture came out pretty good from such a long distance away…don’t you think?

And above, on the right side of the arch, is where that seagull was sitting in the picture above.

We continued heading south and a bit before the town of Elk, we came to another pullout.  Above is a look out to see, and below is a look south.

The further we got south, the more it seemed to clear up.

Above is our final look of the Mendocino Coast.  Where you see the land headed to west out to the ocean above, that is Point Arena where the lighthouse is located in yesterday’s blog posting.  The Mendocino Coast is an amazing place.  It is hard for me to pick my favorite location along the west coast….it is just so pretty from the Santa Barbara area north up through the State of Washington and into Canada (although I have not seen anything above Seattle…yet!)  Life up in this area is definitely different, but with views like this, what do you expect?