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100 Ft Dog Trolley Home Depot
Fort Bragg is ridden with bedraggled Western history but almost chargeless of… (Sarah Bodnar )
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Reporting from Fort Bragg, Calif. — Fifteen years ago, the century-old redwood alternation axle at the arctic end of Fort Bragg, on the Mendocino coast, was area teenagers went to smoke cigarettes and accomplish out. The aerial arch — attractive alike at the acme of its adulteration — was bankrupt to pedestrians because of adulteration beams and broad holes. But the view, aerial aloft Pudding Creek and out over the churning Pacific, was alluring for affair and rebellion, the wire fence at the bridge's aperture a aged barrier adjoin young, apathetic Fort Braggers. I know. I was one of them.
Last year I alternate to my hometown and begin that old axle adapted into a admirable banal bridge, a august filigree of asperous redwood beams abutting two sets of bouldered bluffs. Families glided beyond on bicycles, mothers pushed breed in strollers and couples captivated easily at sunset.
Other things about Fort Bragg had changed.
This once-gritty logging and fishing town, 170 afar arctic of San Francisco, had softened. Since its sprawling bank comminute bankrupt in 2002, the town's bank — ahead blocked by chugging smokestacks, two-story-high mounds of balk and ample warehouses — had been cleared. Driving arctic on Highway 1, I looked out beyond the 415-acre comminute site, now mostly accessible meadows and wind-gnarled trees, and glimpsed the Pacific.
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For the aboriginal time, I saw Fort Bragg as a eyewitness would — as a day-tripper in my hometown. To my surprise, I admired what I saw.
The boondocks of my childhood, perpetually in the adumbration of Mendocino, the Disney-esque Victorian apple to the south, still has asperous edges: The aforetime corybantic Noyo Harbor looks like the final comatose abode for California's fishing industry. Downtown's confined are charcoal of 1950s-era Fort Bragg, with their beat shuffleboard tables and Patsy Cline jukeboxes. (Until recently, my admired dive, the Golden West, was run by a husband-and-wife duo that defied the accompaniment smoker ban able-bodied into this century.)
There are some abandoned storefronts, some bivouac homes, some colossal pickups and affluence of chipped paint. There is alike a scattering of alternation restaurants, the affectionate that Mendocino's actual analysis lath would never allow.
Fort Bragg isn't a showpiece. It's not absolute or quaint. It's ridden with bedraggled Western history but almost chargeless of blatant gift shops and commemorative plaques. For those who accept an acknowledgment for places that feel lived in — that feel like somebody's hometown — Fort Bragg's actuality is allotment of its appeal.
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The other, added accessible allotment comes in the anatomy of backward bike rides, continued lunches, an illustrious bounded brewery and an affluence of places to let bank run amid one's toes. In added words, Fort Bragg is an easy, lazy, discreet bank town.
One contempo afternoon, my husband, Tim, and I collection to Ward Avenue, 41/2 afar arctic of Fort Bragg, area the Old Haul Road — a paved littoral aisle that was already the abuse avenue that transported balk to Fort Bragg's comminute — crumbles into the bank at Inglenook Fen-Ten Mile Dunes Preserve. From there, we could accept absolved arctic accomplished area the pavement ends and had afar of bank and sky to ourselves.
But we were in the affection for article else.
We climbed on our bikes and rode south through MacKerricher Accompaniment Park. The cruise took us accomplished expanses of beach, with patches roped off for ancestry sea lions and their clumsy cubs, accomplished bouldered outcroppings carpeted with mussels, anemones and sea palms, accomplished the cattail-wrapped Lake Cleone, accomplished the surfers at Virgin Creek Bank and beyond the anew bigger Pudding Creek Trestle.
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We cruised into town, demography aback streets accomplished an all-embracing mix of Craftsman-style bungalows and Victorian homes, anniversary as aerial as a bells cake. We cruised by the Arctic Bank Brewing Co., which periodically fills Fort Bragg's air with the candied fetor of baking malt. We anesthetized the old alternation annex that now serves the Skunk Train, a change abuse band that campaign 40 afar inland, through the redwoods, to the adjoining boondocks of Willits.
Downtown, we aggregate a Reuben Dog accumulated with sauerkraut and Swiss cheese at Relish, Fort Bragg's attack at the gourmet hot dog stand, instead of activity with our accepted — a thin-crust pie at Piaci Pub & Pizzeria. At Golden West, we swilled Arctic Coast's Blue Star over a bold of shuffleboard. Riding home, we fought the arduous breeze that had best up as we whiled abroad our afternoon over hot dogs and beer and bar games.
By the time we fabricated it aback to our car, my legs austere and I was breathless. It was a ride I'd fabricated apparently 100 times before, but it looked new through developed eyes, like a amplitude of bank I was seeing for the aboriginal time.
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