redwood national and state parks

This might be a record for me: three weekends in a row in different national parks! 

Liam had two days off for fall break, and Max and Henry jumped at the chance to take a couple days off themselves, so we decided a trip was in order. I asked for ideas for where to go, and only Max really had a strong opinion, which was that he wanted to hike in the forest and see some really big trees. Mike wholeheartedly endorsed that plan, so we set our sights on Redwood.

This was mayyyyybe slightly too ambitious for a long weekend. Here's how our travel looked: Liam got a ride home from Purdue on Friday morning, then once we got off work Friday, we drove to Chicagoland and stayed in a hotel. We caught an early flight from Midway to Oakland (4 hours), got our rental car, and then still had 5 hours of driving ahead of us just to get to Eureka, on the southern end of the park. The boys were good sports about it, but this was not their favorite kind of vacation.

They perked up on the first day once we reached Avenue of the Giants. We caught our first glimpses of the big trees and were appropriately wowed. It was late in the afternoon by this time, so we didn't spend a ton of time there, but the boys had a blast climbing on downed trees and even heading down a hillside to meander along the banks of a river. (I stayed up top because my foot cannot be trusted on those inclines.) 

We really only had one full day in the park, so we tried to make the most of it. The boys really love doing challenging hikes with Mike whenever possible, so this time I made reservations for them to hike the Tall Trees Trail. This trail is by permit only, and it's about 40 minutes from the main road through the park. The first 20 minutes of that drive is windy, narrow paved roads, but then there's a locked gate (they email you the code to unlock the gate; it all feels very dramatic) followed by a windy, extremely narrow, not at all nerve-racking dirt road for the final 20 minutes. All in all, it was about a 90-minute drive from our hotel. I dropped them off, then figured I had about three hours on my own before they would be ready to pick me up. What I didn't plan on was that I would have to spend basically half of that time just getting to and from the main road. UGH. I ended up driving to a coastal overlook, but it was so foggy that I couldn't actually see anything, so I came back down and checked out one of the visitor centers, then headed back to the trailhead, where Mike and the boys were waiting.

I don't have any firsthand knowledge of their hike, but they all seemed like they really enjoyed it. They were full of stories about their adventure all the way back to the main road. After that, we tried to go on a shorter hike together to a small waterfall, but we got halfway down the trail only to discover that the second half was really steep inclines, so I ended up turning back while they went ahead to finish the trail. Somewhere along the way, some shoving happened, with the result that Henry fell down and broke his phone on both the front and back sides. He was uninjured, but Max is going to have to buy him a new phone. Good thing he works so many hours at Culver's!

Monday morning we got up and started the long drive back to Oakland. We returned to Avenue of the Giants, and this time we were able to hike together and go to the visitor center (which was closed by the time we got there that first day). We spent most of the morning exploring in the rain, with the boys, undeterred by the previous day's phone mishap, climbing and running and jumping and waving sticks around. They climbed up the roots of one particularly big downed tree, and I have a little video of Liam saying "It would be funny to try to slide down this branch to get to the bottom" ... right before Henry slipped and accidentally slid all the way down. Whoops. He got a little bruised, but he doesn't seem to have any splinters or other lasting damage. That's what he gets for wearing crocs to a tree-climbing party.

We were planning to stop at Muir Woods once we got back to the Bay Area, but the boys had a different idea, so we went with their plan, which was to see the Golden Gate Bridge. So now we can cross that landmark off our list too. I'm glad we did that, because we ended up driving over both the Golden Gate Bridge and the Bay Bridge, as well as all over downtown San Francisco, on our way back to Oakland. It really is very hilly! Mike and I definitely want to come back just to explore San Francisco some more.