America Road Trip // Part 2

So today I am checking with you today from our hotel room in San Fransisco! It’ Friday evening and we are wiped out!! Its been amazing here and we have explored everything that San Fran has to offer. We have one more full day left before we head off to Vegas! Ahhhh….we are super excited and can’t wait to start the second half of our trip!

So, the last post ended with us staying in Coos Bay and the next and final part of our trip down the Oregon coastline. I also, honestly never thought I would be sharing with you all the story I will be telling you next!!

Oregon Coastline

We woke up early in Coos Bay and left our Motel….an interesting experience, not as scary as it looks in the movie, but I won’t be rushing back in a hurry. We got in the car and started our journey down the rest of the coastline to Redwood National Park.

Warning –  I am going to be sharing more beach photographs! Haha we couldn’t stop taking pictures and going for short little walks, but we wanted to make the most of it and it was so beautiful!

With our Road Trip music playlist playing in the background, taking in the scenery, we both agreed this was the easiest driving. Way easier than we could have imagined. Windy, wide roads. Literally, it was everything we had in mind when we were dreaming of our road trip.

Well the next bit, I definitely didn’t think would be a story I would be sharing for a while and for all you romantic lot, I will most probably be doing a whole separate blog post on this next bit…

We stopped at a stretch of beach and thought it would the perfect place to take some photographs for my Print Store on this stunning stretch of beach.

It felt abandoned, no one to be seen in the several miles of beach we could see.

Curly told me to take some photographs while he was going to run back to the car to get a couple of bottles of water and an extra jumper, so we could go for a bit of a walk.

When he got back we said we would set up the GoPro on the tripod and get a picture of the two of us. Well, lets just say he started to act a little bit weird and slyly asked me to look back along the coastline we had just driven along. Me, completely clueless, turned around and looked up at the view point we had stopped at and the road we had driven along. After a couple of moments, I turned back around and to my complete shock, Curly was on one knee!!

I couldn’t stop crying, so happy and I spent about 5 minutes saying ‘You’re joking!’ then double checking he had asked my Dad first (of course!), then crying, then crying some more!

So, turns out Curly recorded the whole thing on video! I am still smiling ear to ear and cannot believe how happy and such a special moment it was. It made the end of our adventure on the Oregon Coastline so memorable.

Redwood National Park

So after a very emotional afternoon, our drive to Redwood was a series of phone calls back home to close family, more tears, and not going to lie a few more. We finally got to our accommodation we were staying at, Elk Meadow Cabins. They kindly offered us to stay in their Lady Bird Cabin – I will be doing a review on this on my lifestyle blog soon! As we had something to celebrate, we decided to head into the local town to buy some champagne and some food to do a BBQ.

Our stay at Elk Meadows was really incredible and we were gutted we were only staying for one night but it was a great stay and would highly recommend it!

On our day in Redwood we went for a walk….well more like a hike! Exploring a 2.5 mile trail to a place called Trillium Falls. It was so picturesque – literally we were in the thick of Redwood. From googling it before our trip, you can see the trees are pretty big….but oh my goodness, they are HUGE!! Like ginormous!! I really didn’t expect it! I know it sounds lame, but it was really cool wondering around.

Well I say this now, but at the time I was pretty scared…again lame….but when you see a sign as you start walking on the trail that says to watch out for Bears and Mountain Lions, you realise that you are properly in the wilderness…..I was not equipped for this. In fact, I had my mac out half way through to do a blog post whilst Curly was exploring….

If you follow me on Snapchat at all, you would have seen my ridiculous videos about saying how scared I was….I mean the trees were creaking….when you can’t hear anything else, thats pretty weird/scary/a get me out of here quick moment in my book!
This was an amazing adventure day and felt like I deserved a Wilderness Badge at the end of it!

We then hit the road again and stayed in Arcata for the evening. It was relatively close to Redwood, but there was still alot for us to see that afternoon. More coast exploring and driving, it was very chilled. We then decided we wanted to grab take out and head down to the beach and watch the sun set. For some reason we thought it would be a great idea to have Taco Bell…never again!

San Fransisco

We approached San Fransisco super excited, GoPro on, ready to capture the drive up to and along the Golden Gate Bridge. The city looks amazing as you drive in! It reminded me a little bit of driving into New York City and seeing its skyline.

In a nutshell its been all about eating seafood, exploring the sights, catching Ubers (which definitely recommended because of the amount of hills!) and wrapping up warm. No joke, its super windy here!! So although its lovely and sunny, its freezing!

San Fran was everything we imagined it would be.

Although in the grand scheme of things we maybe didn’t need as long as we have planned here, we have had the best time. The highlight for us was definitely visiting Alcatraz, exploring the Golden Gate Park and eating Clam Chowder in the Sourdough bread bowl – San Fransisco’s signature dish at Pier 39.

Tomorrow we are heading to the Golden Gate Bridge to take some photographs and have a wander around the mariner.

I can hand on heart say this has been the most amazing week! Next stop, Vegas and the Grand Canyon! We catch our flight on Sunday and after a couple of days there we will be picking up our second hire car.

To see more photographs along the way you can follow me on Instagram on @charlottebryerash or on snapchat @cbryerash

Much love, Charlotte x