Vacation: Part Trois

As part of our vacation out to California, hubby and I decided that we wanted to see some of what California has to offer. So, I started the research, looking on line, getting those wonderfully annoying tourist brochures in the mail, mapquesting, asking family who had already been there (thanks Joan!), etc. Now, if you don't know me, I generally am an organized person. So, I dumped all the info I found into an Excel spreadsheet with headings such as "City", "Cost", "Description", "Website", and so on and so forth. Using the afore mentioned spreadsheet, hubby and I picked the things we were most interested in doing and I organized them in a word document of a schedule of our "vacation in the vacation", complete with times, driving times/distances, costs (highlighted, if you must know), etc. Yes, I am a dang good vacation planner! I submitted my plan to the peanut gallery, and got the go ahead. It made a ton of sense when originally everyone was able to come. Unfortunately, something came up at my dad's work, and he was only able to join us for the end of the trip. And of course, hubby and Danny Boy went through and re-arranged, added, subtracted from my plans. I got walked all over for doing all the leg work, well finger work, and then used and abused. But that is ok. I am used to it... ;) Kidding. Anyway, it was a fabulous trip!

We left Monday morning at the crack of 10 am, and headed over to the West Coast. After a bit of discussing from the navigators (due to the amount of people going, we had to take 3 cars... It would have been funner to have been in one car, but, on second thought maybe with the amount of crap we took, maybe not), we had an interesting and semi uneventful drive to the coast. We started at the bottom of the Avenue of Giants down by Phillipsville and drove up to our hotel in Arcata.

I suppose I could let everyone else speak for themselves (not likely), but 2 things struck me: 1) How friggin' huge the trees were. 2) How suddenly we were surrounded by huge redwood trees. One minute we are driving, the next we are in the middle of all these huge trees. Needless to say, it was darn cool. Here are some pictures:

This first picture I took for fear that I wouldn't get any other better pictures as far as perspective. Boy was I wrong. That is hubby. And a pretty big tree.

This is Danny Boy pointing to a tree that fell down. The picture doesn't really do it justice. It was a long way down.

Driving down the Avenue of Giants, there are several places to pull over and look at trees. We pulled into one such place and proceeded to have a photo op.

We said, hey look. There is a pretty big tree. Lets get a picture of Kari standing next to it :)

Oh, and I have a bright idea, lets put the girls on top of it...

Oh wait...

There we go... much better :)

This is our little group just looking around at some of the trees. Check out how small we are comparatively.

This is our little family "inside" one of the trees.

And of course, who doesn't think of a flying, cute, chubby baby when they think of the Redwoods. They are pretty much synonymous, I think...

Aunt Pickle with Kaitlyn. One of my siblings has a video that Grandma took of us circling this tree. It took all 8 of us holding hands to get around it... When I get ahold of said video, I will subject you all to it.

Isn't it just so beautiful and peaceful?

Again, for perspective, a short video.

*Disclaimer: Due to the lack of light, and a super expensive camera, some of the pictures appear dark and kinda grainy. Couldn't be helped.

*Also, I have decided to blog semi anonymously, so, names have been changed to protect the innocent :)