The Redwoods

If you go to Northern California you have to see the redwood forests. They are amazing. 

I know there are some forests about an hour north of San Francisco and maybe that would have been closer and great.  We decided to drive to Humbolt State park, about 4 hours north of San Francisco. 

We had a great camp site and it was perfect weather. In fact- we had perfect weather our whole trip. We are lucky!

The trees don't look so big until you see most of our family stand next to one of them and not make it around half of it. HUGE.

We went on 3 or 4 little hikes around the forest.

We saw trees that had fallen and their diameter is truly amazing.

My four boys.

We were not at the parks that have the tallest trees. That was another 2 hour drive more north and I didn't want to do that.

A lot of the trees had these fire scars in them They are like caves.

My boys always had sticks in their hands. Hitting things with sticks is a very boy thing to do.

One of the places had this fun stream to play in.

Sticks. Always have a stick. They come in handy you know.

Back at our campsite- we heard about a "swimming hole" at the river near our site. We had to check it out. 

The water was really really warm. It was not recently melted from a glacier like the water in our mountains at home. This water had been crossing warm California plains for days soaking up the sun. The boys loved it.

There was a snake in the water towards the beginning. It started going straight towards Tanner then dunked down and went right through his legs.

Playing in sand is good too.

Andre taught the 2 youngest boys how to skip rocks. Andre is a pro and Tanner is pretty good.

This is our campsite. Tanner had hours of entertainment for the younger boys by telling them stories about the adventures of Bob the cockroach

The boys loved our campsite. This was in it. They called it "kid cove" no adults allowed.

This was "redwood mesa" (I think). They were constantly climbing up there.

They had lots of places they played in and around. They really play well together (sometimes)

Jaxon had taken his Dungeons and Dragons books so he read them as much as he could.