Long Winded Tales of Our Summer Vacation to California - Part 3

Disclaimer: Marci did a great job summarizing the highlights of the second half of our summer vacation to California. I'm going to spend a "few" words talking about some of the other stuff we saw and experienced that didn't make the "highlight reel" (essentially, show off some of the other pictures I took). If you haven't read her account of the trip, I'd suggest reading it first.

Disclamer #2: This blog post got eaten by the internet gremlins and therefor it is not as nice/creative/flushed out as it's former self. My Apologizes. All the pictures are back in it and I will fill out the text later.

Day 5: Hints of Giants
The next morning we woke up to some savory scones and coffee outside our hotel room. We devoured this "first breakfast", packed up our stuff and headed downstairs for "second breakfast". We quickly learned that there was no menu and we were to simply ask the hotel chef what we wanted to eat for breakfast. This was new, but fun! We ordered an omelet made from veggies and herbs from the hotels own gardens, it was delicious!

Yum!

 I see what you did there...

We continued our northbound journey to the redwood forests and the fog moved with us. As we traveled we stopped at various places such as the drive through tree, one log house, Richardson state park. Many of these stops were off of a scenic route that ran along the highway called "The Avenue of Giants". I would highly recommend taking that drive, it was completely worth the slight travel delay.

You have to pay the bear $1 or he won't let you in the cabin.

Naptime in the "one log house" 

Building at Richardson Grove State Park

Sizing up a tree.

We eventually made it to the "Motel Trees" which was to be our base camp for the rest of our trip. We were a bit nervous about the motel trees as online review were pretty scattered. However, the price and location couldn't be beat (4 nights for the same price as our previous 1 night!) so we took the risk. Our stay ended up being perfect for our needs and if you are really interested, you can read my yelp review for more info.

After waving a foggy hello to Paul Bunyan, our motel neighbor and security guard, we headed even northward to Crescent City to buy supplies for the rest of our trip. (You would be surprised at the variety of meals you can cook in a hotel room using nothing more than a coffee maker!)

Howdy!

 On our way to Crescent City, we managed to catch the first sunset of our trip!

Hooray! A Sunset!

(cheesy motivational quote goes here)

After another day of travel we were glad to be done for a bit and eager to hit the trails in the morning.

Day 6: Our first day in the parks.

I woke up quickly and energetically. I wanted to go hiking! We headed south to the Redwood National Park. The National park is actually the least interesting of all the redwood parks. This is because it is the most recently acquired piece of land in the area, and therefore the most heavily logged. The National park is currently spending the majority of their energy on rehabilitating redwood growth rather than showing it off, like the state parks are able to do.

The first thing we did was hike the Lady Bird Johnson Grove trail. This is the "catch all" trail for the national park as it is short, easy, and shows off the best tree's in the park. For us, it was simply a warm-up.

Plaque talking about the grove

Twisted Bark Growth

Marci gives some perspective to a fallen tree

Once we finished that hike, we headed to the main visitor's center to get our National Park Passport stamped, chat with the rangers about our hiking plans for the next few days, and add another coffee mug to to our ever growing collection of mugs of places we've been.

The visitor's center was right on the beach so we decided it was a good spot to grab lunch and a decent view of the ocean.

Lunch Time

After lunch we headed north to the Prarie Creek Redwood state park to hike the Ten Taypo and Hope Creek Trails. After a while it was clear that these trails were more dense and didn't offer quite as good of views of the trees themselves (at least for photography), but the redwood forest offered interesting things to look at all around, not just up!

Camera shy snail

These guys were hard to get pictures of, very wary!

Fog Drops on a flower

Albino Snail?

I bet he gets good reception on those things.

Finally, we spotted our first banana slug. We heard about these guys at the visitor's center as I was really hoping to see one.

Banana Slug! (approx 6" long)

Once we finished our hike we headed back to the motel to clean up and go grab dinner in crescent city. Before the day was done, we decided to check out the half-mile trail from our motel down to the hidden beach.

Hidden Beach

While I think the name of the beach is pretty accurate, the trail itself was pretty hidden as it was heavily overgrown by what we suspected to be poison oak. Armed with my tripod I fruitlessly attempted to use it as a machete and clear the trail as we went. However, once we got back to the motel and were able to get a wifi signal (via wondering around the parking lot, it reminded me of a scene from the movie "RV", but I couldn't find the exact clip on youtube), I was able to confirm we had not just bushwhacked ourselves into what would have been a rough few days.

Worn out from our three hikes that day, we decided it was time to crash for the night.

Up Next: The biggest trees on earth.