Trippin' with a Baby Part I

We just got back from our first major road trip with Josh. We've taken two trips up to Washington with him, but that was only a five hour drive and then we were stationary with family around. This trip was down through the California redwoods to San Francisco. The longest we stayed in place was two nights in downtown San Fran, so it was a lot of work. We borrowed my grandma's Jeep Liberty. It was great to drive something more "manly" than our tiny little Neon. "Oh, here comes another car on this one lane dirt road, allow me to pull off the road for you, tiny convertible, because I have FOUR WHEEL DRIVE!" "Look, a creek has flooded across our path, no problem for our JEEP!" David was quite pleased, not only with the cool look, but also the features. "What temperature is it outside honey? Well, let me just push a button here and see!" "Allow me to sync up my blue tooth phone to the car and call someone with just a simple voice command." "The next gas stop is in how many miles? Let me just push this button here and tell you how much further we can go on this tank!" He was a little crestfallen to return the Jeep to Grandma.

Anyways, on to the trip. We liked the northern Redwood parks the best, particularly the Jedediah Smith park. It wasn't too crowded and had the Howland Hill Road which was the most beautiful drive we went on, minus the dust of the dirt road. We didn't do any long hikes, due to having to heft around a 25 lb baby and a limited time frame. I'd like to come back here next summer and camp for a few days. The most impressive tree was in Stout grove. It isn't a record holder, but it was the first huge tree I ever saw and we were all alone with it and it was awe-inspiring to me.

At Prairie Creek State Park, we saw more big trees and hiked Fern Canyon. and saw a big elk that wasn't afraid of us at all.


The next morning we stopped at Patrick's Point State Park, which is another place I'd love to come back and camp at. It had some amazing trails. Below is Wedding Rock.

After taking the absolute worst twisty-make-you-hurl road over to Fort Bragg on the coast, we were rewarded with the thickest fog bank I've ever seen. You couldn't even see the water. So pretty much we wasted about 4 hours of driving and headed back inland to drive down to San Fran on 101 instead of hwy 1. We stopped at Humbolt Redwood State Park, which was much more 'touristy' with the drive-thru trees (which yes, we paid an exorbitant amount of money to drive through) and more Big Foot paraphernalia than I ever knew existed.




Wow, there are a lot more pictures I wanted to share than I thought! That's all I have time for right now. Tune in later for the San Francisco portion of the trip report.