Road Trip IV: Redwood Forest

So I think this was our favorite day of the whole trip. A good combination of beautiful scenery while driving, punctuated by some short but sweet hikes to break things up a bit.

We drove very late into the night to arrive at Eureka, California, just south of Redwood National Forest. We slept for a few hours there and then grabbed a delicious breakfast at a little diner. By the way, a major shout out to Yelp for excellent restaurant recommendations. We had a goal on our trip not to eat at any chains and I'm pretty sure we fulfilled it except maybe once or twice (when we really didn't have any more options), so we relied heavily on Yelp to guide us to good eats and were generally quite pleased.

After we ate we drove up to the forest. We got out at one point and did a nice little loop hike in the forest. Beautiful, but no Ewoks.








Then we drove some more to some look out points, and started heading to Oregon. On our way to Oregon we saw a look out point that was supposed to be nice so we drove up and got out of the car. It was really foggy and we saw this little out-cropped lookout point way down below the cliffs and decided to hike down there to see if we could get a better view away from the fog. This was a super fun hike. There were tons of wildflowers growing in the sides of the cliffs and the scenery was stunning. The one drawback was that there were hundreds of little snakes slithering around in the grass, which was a little bit disconcerting, but we managed.






Then we kept heading north to Oregon, stopping in Crescent City to look around a bit and eat some dinner, and then stopped some random place in Oregon for the night.

Road Trip III: San Francisco

After our day in Monterey, we went into San Francisco. We explored around the pier and took a boat ride around the Bay to see the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz. It was really beautiful, but also very windy outside. Audrey couldn't keep her eyes open it was so windy, so we went back inside till the wind died down. Todd headed to the Flagship Apple Store in Union Square to get a case for the "I-Pad Mini" I got him for Father's Day (that's our clever name for an I-pod Touch), and we finished up the day by grabbing some Mexican food and cookies in the Mission District. Oh, well we actually finished the day by driving until 1 a.m. to get to our next destination, Eureka.

I love San Francisco, I do. I love that it is the closest thing to an old European city on the west coast that we have. There are many other things that I love about it. What don't I love, though? Well, let me tell you: All of the young hipster people there who think they are really, really cool. And they were all at the Mexican restaurant we were at, feeling really self-important and hip. But other than that, I do love San Francisco.

Random Happenings

Todd's brother came down to help do some things around the house. Joseph was very helpful.

So was Audrey.

We had a church picnic at the beach. We anticipated it would be chilly so we didn't take swimsuits. We should have known that Joseph would insist on swimming anyway -- we turned around and he had stripped down. So we put on a pull-up and he had a blast.

Joseph is officially potty-trained. It was a long process but he is enjoying the "laptop" he got as a reward.

Meanwhile, Audrey's learning to drive.

She's also learning to eat finger foods.




And to get into mischief.

Road Trip II: Monterey

So blogging about this trip will never happen if I try to take the time to do elaborate posts and picture captions ... I am already a few months late. So, quick descriptions and a bunch of pictures and that's that.

We spent our first day in Monterey. In the morning, we walked around Monterey from the Wharf down through Cannery Row to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. After spending the rest of the morning in the aquarium and grabbing some lunch, we headed to the 17-Mile Drive to see the beautiful Monterey coastline and visit Pebble Beach. (I am editing this post to note that Todd insisted on changing into slacks when we got to Pebble Beach. Even though he wasn't golfing, he didn't want to APPEAR to be a non-golfer.) That night, on our way to a hotel near San Francisco, we ate at this adorable little German restaurant in this tiny little town in the Santa Cruz mountains. Todd didn't think the food was as authentic as he wished, but it was an idyllic little place in these huge trees and it was still pretty fun.

Monterey:




Aquarium:







Pebble Beach: