Pre-Vacation

Well, we had a nice long vacation – on the tail end of summer. We were planning to meet up with my parents and younger siblings in Lassen, but before that we wanted to visit the California Redwoods. On our way there we stopped at Oregon Caves and took the guided tour. It was a weekday afternoon so there were only 7 of us including the guide which was a good thing because most of the cave rooms and passages were quite small. It was really neat to see the various cave formations and hear the stories about the cave’s discovery and history and the theories about how it was formed. I was snapping a lot of photos, both with flash and without, but when I got them home I realized they almost all came out looking super scary (and/or blurry.) Oh, well.

The first night we camped at Jedediah Smith Redwoods. The campground was packed, and the only sites available said “one night only.” So we went on our way the next day. BN took an exploratory mission to see if he could discover any of the record-breaking trees that are in an undisclosed location in the nearby forests. Here’s one that’s pretty impressive:

Next stop was the coastal redwoods. We camped at Gold Bluffs Beach. It was very foggy the whole 2 days that we were there, and pretty cold.

We set up our campsite and went down to walk on the beach.

There were so many beautiful rocks on the beach that BN was inspired to make a mosaic.

On our second day we took a hike in the redwoods.

The weather was nice for this, cloudy but dry. The forest was very dense with weathered-gray redwoods, and of course the coordinating ferns and clovers. Lovely!

Then it was off to Redding, to visit my uncle, aunt, and cousins who recently built their new home there. As we drove inland it started to get very hot and we were able to find a really neat swimming hole accessible by a short hike from the road. BN found these very flat, very round, very discus-like rocks. Skip that!!

My uncle’s house is on a bit of property (at least from my city-girl perspective) with beautiful oak trees and views of wide-open space with distant mountains. They have a wide porch running almost all the way around the house and we sat out there in the balmy evening under the nearly-full moon. They are so hospitable and open, we really enjoyed spending the evening with them and were so amused to watch the dog (a little Westie) and cat play-fight and chase each other around. The fact that it was so warm was very pleasant, coming from the cold foggy coast and heading to the high-altitude chill of Lassen…