My wife and I recently celebrated our 37th wedding anniversary by travelling to Westport Beach on California’s Lost Coast in Mendocino County. It’s about 17 miles north of Fort Bragg, California on Highway 1. We were up there for about a week and thoroughly enjoyed the area and the beautiful Fall weather. For those interested in visiting the Lost Coast Fall is typically when they have the best weather; winds are calm, the temperature is warm, and the fog lays off the coast. This trip did not disappoint. We had one foggy day, but the fog cleared off by noon. We had one day were it rained very early in the morning. The other five days we had beautiful weather. Rather than detail every day and what we did I’ll just give you a synopsis and photos of places visited.

Beaches and coastline

Our campsite at Westport Beach RV Park was about a 2 minute walk to the beach. We spent quite a bit of time on that beach, especially at sunset.

Westport Beach

Point Cabrillo Light Station

Seaside Creek Beach / Ten Mile Beach
Easily our favorite beach. Although the beach is only about 4 miles long. It’s named for the Ten Mile Creek which empties into the ocean here.

Mendocino Headlands State Park

Coffee

We can’t have a vacation without coffee! We only found two good coffee shops and one bad one while we were there. I’m sure there were more good coffee shops but these were the only two we could find. Sips: Organic Coffee and More in Miranda was by far the best followed closely by The Waiting Room adjacent to Cafe Borjolais in Mendocino. The bad one was Headlands Coffee in Fort Bragg. Maybe we just caught them on a bad day but the coffee was barely drinkable.

The Comet

Since it only comes around once every 800,000 years (or so they say) I had to try to go out and find it. Visible just after sunset and just to the right and above Venus. Never saw a thing. So on a whim, I took some pictures of the night sky about 45 minutes to an hour after sunset hoping my phone would capture it. It did.

Avenue of the Giants

The RV Park

This was the quietest, most picturesque RV park we’ve been to in a while. They bill themselves as a resort but there really aren’t many amenities aside from the beach that they front. There is a playground for the kids and a horseshoe pit but those hardly qualify as resort amenities. The beach was lovely aside from the breathtaking amount of sand fleas, some of them almost roach-sized. By far the most colorful character at the park was the one we never saw. We felt our trailer lurch violently on our first night. I thought maybe we had slipped off our leveling blocks. In talking to the lady next door they asked if we had seen the bear yet. I replied that we hadn’t. She told me that the bear was pushing on their motor home one night and almost shook them out of bed. That explained our trailer shake. Luckily he only pushed one time and left no marks on the trailer.

To wrap this trip up it was just amazing. We’ve been to the Lost Coast before but it’s been close to ten years. We definitely want to go back, probably again in the Fall. This time, we’ll spend even more time there, and probably a little closer to Mendocino this time.