california {part two}

 

I am finally here to finish blogging about our Cali vacation!  You can guess the reasons for my delay… she was teething, sick, teething, sick, and just all-around crabby!  Same old story lately!

…

So after we checked out the mammoth trees at dusk, we kept on driving till we finally found a camp ground around 8:30 pm.  We parked the van and scrambled to move groggy children and make room for our sleeping bags in the back of the van.  I must say it was easier ‘camping’ with the kids than I thought it would be.  Susie had never slept outside her crib, but she slept snugly between Ty and I after she layed awake kicking her feet like a sea monkey for some time.  Mark was out in five seconds – he doesn’t wake up from sleep well and falls back asleep faster than you can say “narcolepsy”.

In the morning we had our beef stroganoff breakfast (freeze-dried hiking food).  Yummy!  (can you hear the sarcasm?)  But the sun was beautiful streaming through the forest. 

Driving in the dark the night before, we had seen far off ships’ lights and guessed correctly that we had indeed reached the coast!

We saw a little park on the beach and took advantage of it, since we wouldn’t be driving the coast for long.

Mark was a little worried that the waves would take Daddy away, and Susie was cool for a little while…

That is, until she realized the sand was sticking to her feet…

Here comes Daddy to the “rescue”…

But he rescued her by putting her feet in the big, loud ocean…

Then he swooped her up and rescued her from that too, so she forgave him.

 

I asked Mark to stand still and I got these pictures…

 

What a peaceful, serene place to practice your interpretive dance moves.  Why didn’t I think of that?

As we all made our way back to the car, Mark was running behind us all and thought that the ocean was going to take him away which you would think would make him run faster but he decided to stop and cry.  That is when Susanna decided she was tired all of a sudden so we officially ended our little beach excursion.

I snapped one last Good-bye shot of the beach as we left…

The Distractor just woke up from her nap, so I am posting this now and milking one more post out of the Cali trip the next time I get a chance to blog!

california {part one}

 

I’m really not trying to milk two posts out of our California trip, I just have that many pictures!  So here comes the pictures of our trip down.  The drive was over eight hundred miles one-way and we spread it over two whole days, making many stops for the kids’ needs, as well as fun stops along the way.

The first fun stop we made was the Heaven on Earth Restaurant on Grant’s Pass in Oregon…

We were just about to call Ty’s mom and ask her where she had said the place was with the awesome cinnamon rolls when we saw their big sign!  It was really rustic inside.

 

We were waiting to order and this man got up to leave and the waitress said, “Oh, sir, don’t you want me to box up the rest of your cinnamon roll?” and he said no thanks.  I looked over and his ‘leftovers’ still occupied half the dinner plate!  I was tempted to say, “We’ll take them!”  Then I realized that was kinda weird.  Maybe a lot weird.  But I took a picture to show you how big they were (not at his table – that would be for sure weird!)…

For some reason, that picture does not do it justice.  That is a round cake box and the roll filled it even though it doesn’t look like it in the picture.  They were truly the size of a dinner plate.  And very delicious, though they are the “bready” (vs. “gooey”) variety, but the bread was really, really good!  And I am usually on team Goo. 

Anyway, the little coffee break set up the format for the rest of the trip…

His and hers coffee was my life support.  I felt the need to text friends about random things along the way because I was stuck in a car with toddlers for hours on end.  And I took many, many bad pictures out the window of the car.  Really, I know they rarely turn out good but I just couldn’t stop myself.  On to the good stuff.

Near Grant’s Pass Oregon we took exit 55, leaving I-5, and taking the Redwood Highway 199, which would lead us to our first tourist attraction.  A short time later, we crossed the line into California and we did NOT like what we saw.  There was a very frequent, “Really?” and “You’ve got to be kidding me.” muttered during this time…

Yes, we were greeted with a foot of snow.  Granted, this was not on I-5, since we took the Redwood Highway, it was a more mountainous route, but still.  Snow?!  Really?  On our Cali vacation!?

But it soon cleared up and the scenery was really beautiful…

We turned off the highway for our destination which was basically a logging road which takes you to the park and then back to the highway. This is the point where Mr. B. started yelling, “There’s a big’un!!!” about every thirty seconds.  I can’t tell you how many times we thought we had found the biggest one and had to stop and take pictures all over again.

And we hadn’t even arrived at our destination yet.  But it wasn’t a bother, it was a beautiful drive and the trees were mammoths.

The road literally weaves in and around these trees, some of them even had scars where cars had scraped them many a time.  And this was our destination in the woods…

There was a little trail about a mile long that wound through the forest full of giant Coastal Redwoods, putting us in our place, in awe of God’s creation…

We paused at the biggest tree in the grove (we think) and took a family picture, balancing the Nikon on a slimy, wet log!

So that was the biggest (as in, ‘fattest’) tree in the grove, but Coastal Redwood trees are actually known for being the tallest, not the fattest.  The fat ones are Giant Sequoias and we didn’t see them on this trip, though they are in the area.

 

I kept trying to get a whole tree in the picture with something to compare it to for size, but they were just too tall!  I couldn’t even come close to capturing the whole thing.

Except at this angle…

So we continued down the logging road back toward the highway to look for a place to camp out in the van.  The forest was so shaded by the giants that there was tons of moss, making these trees look like creatures rising up out of a swamp…

And the last picture of the night, before it got officially too dark to take pictures, this big ole stump, almost as big as our van…

I might have been a little bit sad that Mr. B. didn’t jump out with his pocket knife to add our initials. 

So that is the first leg of the trip.  Hopefully my teething daughter will be nice and afford me enough time to show you the rest of the trip tomorrow!

Peace,

Tash

snow day

 

Okay, some of you know we took a little vacation to California last weekend, and you are just going to have to hold your horses for the post about that.  I am halfway done editing photos and hope to do the post in the next day or two.  Yes, I edit almost everything.  I am IN-sane. 

But, I have good news.  I just saved a bunch of money on my car insurance by switching to Geico.  Just kidding.  The good news is that I am holding my OCD in check and posting this little snow day post without enhancing the photos.  You can hardly contain your excitement, right?  Well then, let’s get to it.

This is what we woke up to the first morning we were back from Cali…

What it continued to do the next day…

And what it looked like yesterday morning…

Not a crazy amount of accumulation, but enough to have me and the kids feeling a little cooped up.  Mr. B. mentioned taking the kids out in the snow yesterday… um… Susie is 1 and she doesn’t even have shoes right now, so that was not happening.  But it reminded me of a friend’s post about bringing snowmen in the house to watch them melt…  That is when I got the idea to bring the snow to her.  A sensory experience for sure!

   

   

I just didn’t realize that taste was the main sense she would be exercising during this experience…

 

It was literally like she thought it was a bowl of popcorn… she ate and ate until it was gone/melted.

Look at her hold the bowl with her legs like she is an ape…

 

I think she thought that foot was gonna steal some of her precious snow popcorn!

 

So that was our snow day in the house.

Cali pictures coming soon!

Tash