We had an interesting day. James woke up with his ears plugged up and I woke up with no voice at all. So I squeaked all day long, only a little blip every several syllables actually coming out, the rest just disappearing into the air. And James spent all day leaning in and saying, "Huh???" Ha!As we were driving up the mountain we spotted a couple of parachuters up above us. Very cool.
The farther we drove the more snow there was--something we hadn't expected. Most of it was very old and crusty and dirty, but still... it was SNOW. :-)
And here we have it, the General Sherman tree, the largest tree in the whole world. How cool is that?!
After just seeing the Redwoods, the Sequoias didn't really seem that much bigger... until you got right up next to them! This tree is magnificent. It's just gargantuan.
The bark on these trees is so very different than than on the Redwoods (these actually look more red!) and something about them is... I don't know, I just think they are soooooo neat. The Redwoods are amazing and are the tallest trees on earth, but the Sequoias are more beautiful, I think. They look almost animated or something.
Here's looking UP at the General Sherman.
And here are all sorts of really cool facts about it, for those who are interested. :-) Just click on the picture to enlarge it.
Just another tree we stopped to take pictures with, since you can't actually walk right up to the Sherman tree and most of the others in that area. I guess they don't want people carving their names or something. Ha!
Trying to stretch around just this side of the tree... and not fall down the mountain. :-)
We had taken stuff with us to have another picnic on this day, so that was nice. We found a quiet little picnic table away from the crowds (which really weren't that bad--especially after having been at Yosemite on a Saturday!) and had lunch. We let the kids climb around a bit on the mountainside and only needed one band-aid when it was time to load up. Here are a couple of pictures taken on the way down.
It's strange. I knew that seeing the Sequoias (which, despite my lack of commentary about them, was one of the VERY COOLEST parts of this entire vacation) was the last thing on the list of things to see and do before we headed home. I guess my body was aware of it as well as my brain because about ten minutes after we headed down the mountain I was out cold! If you knew anything about the road that goes down that mountain (10 mph curves the whole way) that would be remarkable to you. Ha! I slept through the whole thing. I didn't wake up until I felt the van stopping. I looked up and saw that we were at a road side fruit stand. And it was over 90 degrees! Up where the trees were it was 52 degrees. James said at the base of the mountain it was 94!!! THAT'S NUTS. Why would anybody live UNDER the mountain instead of ON it??? Anyway, we'd been seeing these fruit stands all over the place, but didn't want to buy anything that would go bad sitting in the car until we got home. We finally decided we could get some cherries--I knew the crowd would eat those fast. :-) So we bought some nice, shiny sweet cherries, fresh of the tree. Yum!
I took over the driving for a while, until we stopped for dinner, I think. I don't remember when or where that was. Throughout the trip we'd been trying to stop between seven and eight o'clock each night, both so we wouldn't be driving in the dark (we wanted to SEE things!) and so we would wear everybody out by driving late into the night. But we were on our way home at this point so we drove until about 10:30 or so.
Oh, wait. Somewhere along the way we saw some more of those nifty windmills. This wasn't NEARLY as many as there had been up north of Bakersfield, but still neat.
The kids are such great travelers and they are usually quite content to just read books or draw pictures or play travel games. These were taken after it got late that night...
Joe was THRILLED when we finally said he could get his guitar out and play for a while. He'd been asking throughout the whole trip and he finally got his chance on our late night in the van. We all sang for a while, but the BEST was when Sam sang "This Old House" for us. Ha!
Our day ended in Needles, California, just a few miles from the Arizona border on I-40.
1 comment:
I knew you would like the Sequoia's better than the Redwoods. They're just much more massive. We went when there was 6 foot of snow on the ground. All those fences were under the snow and we just walked up to all the trees without knowing there were fences or walkways there. Cool place.
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