The Redwoods or Bust!

This year for our family vacation I decided that we needed to see the Redwoods in CA.  We were SO excited!  Since the driving would take a huge chunk of our time we decided to leave after church on Sunday.  And so our adventure began!  The first leg of driving was uneventful.  We enjoyed seeing the salt flats in western Utah that Abbie had researched for one of her school projects.  The kids enjoyed some snacks, squeeze cheese and crackers, which we only buy for vacation.  Here’s Spencer mimicking his snacking creation.

Aunt Heather gave us a fun vacation package and we opened the first gift, a journal.  Jessie became our recorder for the trip and we will have many fun memories thanks to her.  We got to the hotel in Winnemucca, NV later than we thought and by the time the small kids settled down from the excitement of being somewhere new is was around midnight.

After breakfast at the hotel, and meeting a very nice lady who we shared a table with, and cleaning up syrup that Isaac spilled all over himself we were on the road again.  We opened up a few more gifts, one was chalk to draw on the sidewalk with…We were on the look out for some good spots to place a sticker from our vacation package without being annoying and Jessie spotted the perfect one when we stopped for gas.

The cute baby taking a break from her carseat…

Driving to the CA coast took a long…..long……long….long time, partly because there are not any main highways that go that way so you have to do some back tracking going rather far south and then north again and then you follow a very windy, very long, road going not very fast at all around this huge lake…like and over an hour driving around this lake….very pretty but long.  After the lake we spotted a bunch of firefighter camps and some awesome helicopters….and then we saw the smoke…it looked like they had a big job on their hands!

And then….some of the trees started getting bigger and then a few more bigger ones and then we started getting really excited and ohh and ahhing out the windows and wanting everyone to check out the tree that we saw….it was very fun!  We got to our hotel in time for dinner, but we missed their free cheese sampling party.  Our suite had a kitchen and we had taco soup for dinner, YUM!

The pool was outdoors and we decided not to go swimming, it was barely warm out, and so we took a walk into town and passed some interesting shops and some interesting people and then headed back for some cookies before bed.  The kids still had some extra energy….which they used chasing each other all over the room…luckily no one got hurt, that I remember.

In the morning, Jessie placed another sticker and decorated our van while the little kids drew with the sidewalk chalk and Ken and I repacked everything.

Our first official stop was Stephens Grove Loop Trail.  “The trail begins in a fairly impressive redwood grove. From the trailhead, which is elevated a few feet above the grove, there's a good view of the big trees around the pullout. Other than a few sprays of redwood sorrel there's little or no groundcover. Just a few yards from the trailhead is a Y intersection. Oddly, two redwoods, one huge and one small, have been cut down and left lying on the forest floor; the trail passes through breaks sawed into the fallen trees.” (I had done a ton of research on trails to hike and such. So this is a description from one of the sites I was using.)  Being our first encounter with the huge trees we were all in awe!  The kids climbed on the cut trees at the beginning of the trail for quite a while…..they were just so big around and so long!

As totally amazing as it was….the lighting for pictures without a tripod was terrible!!  So sad!  We quite enjoyed wondering around, but toward the middle of the loop the trail vanished into almost nothing….not so cool for those of us who had never been there before….we ended up hiking this really steep embankment only to be led to the back of a trailer park…I guess the cool part of that was being high enough in the air to see into the trees rather than just looking up from the trunk…oops. 

The kids found all sorts of nooks and crannies to explore.

And this last one….Jessie got stuck trying to squeeze back out …quite the scene of us tugging on her to try and pull her out…even Isaac tried helping, while Mark on the other hand wanted to get the whole thing on film with Ken’s phone…. and Jessie, she was laughing about the whole thing.

This clover is called “ redwood sorrel.”

trying to count the rings

We tried reaching around the biggest tree we saw as a family with outstretched arms, but the first and last person couldn’t even see the each others outstretched hand it was so big around.  That was really hard to take a picture of, so we all just stood in front of the trunk, and it is still wider than us. 

Well that was our first morning….hopefully more soon.