Northern California

We found where they filmed (bits of) Jurassic Park; no, not the side of California Highway 1, but in Redstone National Park.
We arrived in the park after leaving Oregon and spent most of the day there, driving and walking through the prehistoric forest. Redstone trees really are staggeringly, neck-achingly big. Stands of them line the roads and even the small ones are enormous.
The trunks are as wide as a house and 350 feet tall; anyone walking by immediately looks like a toy and feels like an insignificant little blip.
According to the blurb they used to grow all over America and Europe, but the mists of Northern California suit them very well and they are still here (apart from the thousands that were cut by loggers during the gold rush). I was fascinated and awed; these trees inspire respect.
So, like good tourists we paid $4 to drive through one with a road carved in the middle, and then took turns photographing each other shrinking into the giant forest. On the ranger's advice, we also drove down a dark, steepish track lined with ferns and Redwood stumps, half-expecting a dinosaur at each bend, to Fern Canyon, a spooky high-sided river bed with ferns lining the walls and strewn with fallen logs. It's highly atmospheric, though now best known as a setting from Jurassic Park. Movie buffs might like to know that some Star Wars scenes were shot nearby too.
After dark, C bravely drove us along the Redstone-lined Avenue of the Giants and we spent the night, after too many hours driving, collapsing into a very retro motel at Laytonville.
G