The Last Day on the Road...

When we awoke in the morning and headed on our way we found ourselves in tourist country. This was very disheartening because every place we stopped that was supposed to have giant trees was a tourist trap. They all charged way too much money (and we were pretty broke, this being the end of out trip). There were giant figures of Paul Bunion and Babe the Blue Ox everywhere, but we had been seeing those since Minnesota so we were used to them by that point. We did see something that we didn't see at any other Paul/Babe site, and that was a little kid punching Babe's balls. That was weird on a lot of levels, the least of which was that I always thought Babe was a girl, but I guess I don't know much about American lore.


In order to escape the tourist attractions and to actually see some big trees we took to pulling over on the side of the road whenever we came across a grove that had trees we thought were big enough. This turned our to be a good strategy. We saw trees wider around than any we had ever seen before. They were wide and shot straight up into the air. So high. We had fun exploring the forests on the side of the road, but we knew there were bigger trees out there some where and we got back to searching.

The GPS stopped working in this area because the trees were so tall they blocked the signal. This means that we had to use regular old maps to try and find the national parks. As it turns out we all suck at that because we kept missing them. We were all starting to get stressed by mid-day because we were afraid we had missed all of the legendary giant trees. I reached my breaking point when Sophie pooped on my pillow. We HAD to pull over for a de-stress session. We picked the best spot for that because Molly found these beautiful giant four leaf clovers that were a brilliant purple on the underside. They were amazing! I think Molly got pictures, so hopefully she'll post those soon. Once we all chilled out we made a plan to stop at the next national park.

The park we pulled into was breath taking. We drove for several miles on a dirt road until we found a little parking lot. The dogs had to stay in the car, but we got out and made our way down the trail. This is where we saw the giant trees we had been searching for.

That's Jared and Matt:

Molly loves trees:

It was an accidental blue day:



Banana slug! I think a sign said that the banana slug was the only bug that could eat the sequoia leaves. Also, the only things that can grow on the ground are ferns and other sequoia buds. It turns out that was what the giant clovers were!



The bark of the fallen trees was like marble, both in pattern and in smoothness.



They tried really hard to get around that tree, and that was one of the smaller ones.



We tried several times to take this picture by ourselves and it failed to hard. We were balancing the camera on a post and using the timer function. Jared, Molly, and I were waiting at the tree and Matt set the timer and than ran to get to us before the timer went off. The first few times his missed it. Then the fell as the timer was going off. See if you can find him! -Also check out Molly's face, she's laughing pretty hard...

We finally got a stranger to get the good photo:




All and all, the Red Woods were amazing. Seeing them on the last day of our journey was the perfect way to end. For the rest of the ride to Portland I was in a daze as my mind tried to make sense of the magnificent things I had seen.

We arrived at our new home after dark. It had been a surreal day and I don't think any of us were prepared to enter real life again after a month on the road. We unpacked the cars and got into cozy PJs. This is what the living room looked like:

Matt and I had been carting around a champagne bottle since PA, courtesy of Matt's pretend sister Abby (thanks Abby!), and it was time to break it open.

Cheers to our new beginning!