The Redwoods...and other "mysterious" trees

(Today's blogger: Fr. Michael) We left Eureka on Saturday afternoon, after enjoying the Arcata farmers' market with Josh and Amy (complete with barbecued oysters--yum!), and enjoying an authentic lumberjack meal at the Samoa Cookhouse, an actual mess hall used by loggers for decades and now open to the public. We feasted on pork steaks, mashed potatoes, calico beans, salad and finished it off with peach cobbler. I chugged a few cups of coffee to avoid the food coma that would have been my fate during that afternoon drive and we headed up the coast.
We made it up to our next national park, Redwood. We pulled in just before sunset and after a quick supper, we all went to sleep early.
Sunday morning found us without a nearby church for the second or third time this trip, so we defrosted some Holy Bread we had saved from Pascha night, said some prayers, and read the readings for the day. After that it was a day exploring the beautiful redwood forests. The kids were pretty grossed out by the banana slugs. Our highlight of the day (OK, my highlight--not the kids' so much) was hiking Redwood Creek. For those of you who've been to Disney's California Adventure, that's the creek where you fly right over the rafters. In typical Disney fashion, the ride has a stronger scent of pine trees than the real thing, but it was beautiful nonetheless. So why wasn't it a highlight for the kids? Let's just say they're not much for hiking. They're REALLY good at complaining about hiking--and actually they're really good at hiking--they just don't like doing it very much. And they love to tell us how much they really don't like doing it very much.
After a day of hiking around (and visiting the obligatory Visitor Center to watch the obligatory movie) we headed a bit further north, staying in an RV park right on the shore of the Klamath River. It was one more of those "this is too beautiful to be true" places, and we felt very blessed to be able to enjoy it.
We woke up the next morning and headed north, not entirely sure where we'd end up. Our first stop was a whole 3 miles up the road from where we camped. It was a classic 1960's/70's tourist trap called "Trees of Mystery." The owners were smart because they must have known that when you're traveling with kids, they're usually so bored that they beg and plead for you to take them to any place that looks like it was made for kids to enjoy, even if the name is "Trees of Mystery." Fortunately, this one had been updated with a sky tram through the redwoods, and that made the stop worth it for everyone. The dozen or so carved scenes from the story of Paul Bunyan might not have done the trick if that was all that was there. My accomplishment of the day was getting out of "One of Northern California's Largest Gift Shops" without having to pay for a bag of rocks or a cheesy snowglobe. After being mystified (not so much) by the Trees of Mystery, we headed north and then did something we hadn't done since we began the trip. Which you can read about in my next post!