Day 2 - Redwoods

The kids' favorite part of the hotel stays, was the free breakfast.  I can't tell you how many cinnamon rolls the kids all consumed.  One of my high school friends works for Holiday Inn Express, and she let us use her friends and family discount to book our hotels.  So we stayed in a Holiday Inn Express each night while we were traveling, and it worked out great for us. 

 

 

Thankfully, the drive on Saturday went a lot more peacefully.

It didn't take long (just a few hours) before we were into thick redwood forests.  I spent more than a month researching everything I could about the redwoods and the course that we would drive.  I had a binder with information on everything along the way.  We ended up stopping to see about half of it, and skipping the rest.  But, all the research really paid off to know where we should be stopping.

Our first stop was at Stout Grove.  The road leading to Stout Grove was a single lane dirt road that wound through the forests.  It was pretty scary in our giant van.  But braving the road was worth getting to see this grove of colossal redwoods.  Words can't describe how awe inspiring these trees were.  And it's impossible to capture on camera the magnitude of these trees.  Scott had seen redwoods as a kid, but for me and the kids, this was a first.

Kate started out on Scott's shoulders, but soon she begged to get down so she could explore like the older kids.  She loved having the freedom to run.

I loved being among these amazing quiet giants, and I loved the peacefulness of this grove.  We walked the 1/2 loop and soaked in the beauty.

I was amazed at how many trees were hollowed out (usually by fire), and yet they were still living and growing.  The kids loved climbing inside or them.

This tree had fallen down a hill, then snapped in two when it hit the bottom of the hill.  You can see the roots further of the hill behind the boys.

 There were a lot of trees that had fallen.  The exposed roots were huge. 

I loved all the moss growing everywhere.  

Trying to stretch around a tree - even seven kids weren't enough to reach clear around.

This was a "Where's Waldo" type of picture, where all the kids hid in the mess of fallen trees.

 Our next stop was Kamath River Overlook.  It was our first good look at the ocean.  There were whales down below in the water.  We spent quite a bit of time watching them spray water out their blow holes.  The kids loved it. 

We drove the Newton B. Drury Scenic Pkway, which was a beautiful 10 mile drive through ancient redwoods.  We stopped along the way at Big Tree Wayside, and walked out to see Big Tree.  It totally lived up to it's name!

That night we stayed at another Holiday Inn Express in Eureka, California.  The kids got to go swimming in the hotel pool (it had been too late for them to swim the night before), so they were pretty excited about that.  It was a good day.  We had driven about 5 hours, but spent hours at our stops along the way too.  It was a full day of amazing firsts for most of us.