Mendocino County – A place for all your adventures

by Kevin_Fonger · Published May 24, 2012 , 10:15 am · Updated January 4, 2018 , 9:51 am

As someone who loves to travel and see the outdoors, finding a city or town that has both a social element to it and an element of activity is important to me. I recently had the chance to visit Mendocino County while on my honeymoon. Mendocino is a few hours north of San Francisco giving the Bay Area people a nice escape from the hustle and bustle. Since it’s situated along the coast, many people taking the scenic highway 1 vacation often travel through here as well.

What’s nice about Mendocino is that you don’t have a bunch of hotels, but you get a lot of cool little bed and breakfast’s. The Bed and Breakfast that we stayed at was the Elk Cove Inn & Spa and it was an AMAZING place to stay. We ended up staying in one of the cottages overlooking the ocean that was breathtaking, but it was a little high depending on who you are talking to, $300 a night. During the evening, the Elk Cove has a small happy hour with local wines and cheese and for breakfast, they had an amazing homemade spread. One of the better breakfastes I have had in a long time. Another nice feature of the Elk Cove Inn is that it has beach access. One thing that isn’t as friendly in Elk is the lack of beach or water access. After speaking with a few of the locals, I found out that locals don’t like all the tourist using their property to get to the water.

For activities, you can go ocean kayaking where you can go through caves and watch seals in their natural habitat. Something that is definately worth checking out if you haven’t done it before. Given that I live in Colorado, I don’t always get to see this type of sea life. For the Wino’s, there are a number of local wineries you can tour about 20 minutes outside of town. Inland, there is plenty of hiking and camping to be done. Close to town there are huge Redwood trees which is a site to see if you haven’t seen them before. They make you feel so small. The trails also cater nicely for mountain biking and trail running if you want to get your heart rate up a little more. The trails are super soft and when comparing them to hard packed dirt and rock, it was a nice change.