We spent our last morning in Monterey on the golden sandy beach and walking along Cannery Row, which is now a street of trendy shops and restaurants and hotels.   There are lots of John Steinbeck named places, John Steinbeck Plaza, John Steinbeck Square, etc.  I wonder what he would think of that.  The place certainly resonates with his books – the huge farms with people bent over picking the crops and the old cannery building and Salinas itself.  I bought a copy of Cannery Row – I don’t think I ever read it and I saw the memorial to Ed Ricketts who was the real “Doc” from the book and thought it would be fitting to read it.

We had a long drive to Yreka.  It is a small place (around 7,000 people) set in rolling hills with a backdrop of mountains.  I looked it up on Wikipedia (when I had an internet connection – there doesn’t seem to be one here) and these are the two things I found out:  the name resulted from the days of the gold rush when they were slapping up buildings at a great pace.  They’d built a bakery and had painted a sign which they’d hung up to dry.  It was hung backwards and somehow the “b” hadn’t soaked through so it looked like “yreka” and people thought it was the name of the town, and it stuck.

There have been two lynchings here.  Both happened when gold or money was stolen from the stage or from the bank and the townspeople felt that the authorities were not moving quickly enough to deal with the situation and took the law into their own hands and hanged the people they thought were responsible. 

Not a very auspicious introduction to the town, but it appears to have resolved its vigilante past and is peaceful and quiet now.  Our room has a “creekside” view and you can hear the crickets singing away outside.

Tomorrow we face another long drive to Portland and then after that we arrive home, to our girl, Daisy, and hopefully, our new floor!