California Dreamin'

Hello friends and welcome back… I’ll bet you thought I’d forgotten you!

We’ve been having a swell time here at Redwood, and this morning we’ve just departed and are going to San Francisco. We’ve all made sure to wear some flowers in our hair. We’ve got a long day of driving ahead of us so we were up early, hurrying to depart, and spent most of the day yesterday getting everything packed up. We made it 20 feet before Mom and Dad realized that their super-awesome automatic retracting steps weren’t, um, retracting. So we stopped. And waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. And a crowd gathered, with everyone wanting to help. It was just exactly like that seen in the huh-larious movie RV (the only Robin Williams movie I’ll watch) “Watcha need here is a sewer hose speader.”Except there was no sewage eruption. We finally got on the road at 10:00. (Update 9:00 pm: Upon arrival, we discovered that the super-awesome automatic retracting hydraulic leveling jacks aren't, um, leveling. We're taking the thing in for service in the morning.)

Sunday night Gabe, Kieran and I went on an excellent backcountry overnight adventure. We hiked down the Ossagon Creek Trail (with Mommy and Yaya part of the way) for two miles (all downhill!) and then Monday morning hiked three miles on the Coastal Trail (all flat!) to meet everybody else at Fern Canyon. Which we, of course, always refer to as Fern Gully. It was a great overnight adventure with just about the perfect campsite, a clearing in the woods with a stream on two sides, a quarter-mile from the Pacific. The area of the backcountry campground and that stretch of Coastal Trail are home to a large elk herd. I ran into them (well, through and past, actually) on my bike two years ago and there were dozens of them. It appears by the amount of flattened grass and the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of examples of what we politely call scat that the herd is even larger now. We’ve been reading and watching Harry Potter books and movies in the evenings this week, and the wizards often transport themselves chimney-to-chimney via the Floo Network. So the boys figured out that we were being transported on the Poo Network.

Sunday morning we went to Hidden Beach, so-named because it’s in a cove unseen from the other beaches and available only via a hike through dense forest. Like, tunnel-dense. We went two hours after high tide and had an experience we’ve never had before. We’ve been to tidepools but never have we seen such an abundant and diverse collection of life. We saw dozens of starfish, anemones, crabs (although the birds had been there and it was like the crab holocaust… you could hardly move without stepping on a piece of some poor, delicious crab. Should have brought butter), snails, mussels, periwinkles, and more. We spent more than an hour examining all of the wonderful things and climbing the rocks. Sadly, we also found a deceased sea lion.

Saturday was a fantastic day of making use of a campground. We didn’t do anything productive (well, maybe some laundry) and instead sat around all day reading, playing at the playground with the kids, cooking on the ol’ campfire, enjoying a nice cold beverage, and berry-picking. The campground (it’s actually the Klamath Camper Corral – luckily not a KOA because then it would be named the Klamath Kamper Korral and you just don’t want those initials) is completely surrounded by blackberry bushes, on the trails out the Klamath River are also lined with blackberry bushes. We’ve had fresh blackberries, blackberry Cheerios, blackberry muffins, blackberry pancakes (Mom cooked! Outside!), blackberry oatmeal, blackberry compote to put on toast, and are currently bringing buckets and buckets of fresh and frozen (for jam) berries with us. We probably got back our week’s fee for camping in berries. The grand champion berry-picker in all categories--spotting, quantity, quality of berries, and efficiency of picking--is none other than three-year-old Izzie. No, we haven't adjusted for age. She's simply amazing at it, like a machine, some kind of berry picking savant.

Friday we went on a spectacular hike through the big trees. This loop took us on the James Irvine, Cintonia, and Miner’s Ridge Trails, and was about eight miles long. We saw every cool thing there is to see with the Redwoods on this hike… trees that are 350 feet high; trees that are just a shell of bark for 200 feet but are still alive and growing at the top; trees that were broken, then grew horizontally, then were broken again, then grew up, giving them a lightning-bolt shape; trees that you can climb under and through. I thought it was probably the greatest hike we’ve been on this summer, but I know that not everyone agrees. If Dad we’re blogging he’d say, “First there were some trees, and then there were trees. After lunch, we saw trees.”

We're camped in Petaluma, and right in the heart of wine country. We passed any number of vineyards and wineries on the way, and for a long while our road (Rte 101) parelled the Russian River. But I'm not drinking any @#*@# merlot!

So tomorrow morning we're dropping off Mom and Dad's RV (step, leveling system failure) and the Denali (exhaust/engine, leveling system failure) at two seperate service centers for, you guessed it, service. We're renting a car and heading into the big city for two nights at a real live hotel! We're not planning on bringing the computers with us, so you're going to have to hold on for a couple of days without my incredible, insightful, wit. (Those who read these words of wit...) I'd suggest reading a book, or watching the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy in one sitting.

Buh-bye!