There and Back Again Pt. 2

And then there was silence

I am a city boy, I love being around the hustle and quick pace of the city, I enjoy being a couple minutes from fast food and convenient shopping… but I forgot how much I also love the silence of camping. We arrived in Klamath, Ca around 10 am on Friday morning, what a beautiful if not car sick drive. We were pleased to be there for many reason, the biggest was that Stacy and Libby would not have to be car sick for a while now. Our camping site was in the middle of the redwood forest and we even had some beautiful redwoods right in our campsite!!

It was a lovely, restful, relaxing place where my cell phone (a constant friend in the city) was of no use, except to check my task list and my calendar which suddenly seemed to not matter.

It is amazing how just slowing down and enjoying God’s creation can restore your soul. I found myself enjoying not having a task list and an agenda. I also found peace in the fact that my cell phone had no coverage and there was no way to be reached by it. It was tough at first, but I after a while I even stopped carrying it. That was a weird feeling, but a nice one. Out camp site came with some unique neighbors, we had a couple chipmunks who were quick to clean-up any scraps that fell to the ground and we had a silver fox come and check on us one night (this was Ivans favorite part of camping, he told me last night)

The kids were great helps at getting the campsite
up and running! They each helped in setting up the tent and in unpacking the van. Ivan thought that setting the tent up was a wonderfully fun activity, and was eager to be involved however he could.

After getting our camp site set up, we were all starving and decided to head to town for fish and chips at a place that the local said was awesome, it was!! I ate way too many fish and chips and Libby decided that that was very good. They served us fresh beer batter Alaskan cod.

It was delicious!! I would have eaten there everyday, but we had brought our own food to cook, so once was fine.

After we ate we saw that there was a lighthouse there in town, so we decided to go and take a look at it and explore the coast a bit. We never made it in the lighthouse as we were all distracted by the sea life found in the rocks on the shore.

It was a wonderful adventure. We rescued a starfish (see above) that had washed ashore and we saw sea urchins as well as chasing a few hermit crabs. We were turning over rocks looking for cool stuff when we first found a hermit crab. Ivan thought it looked cool and picked it up… when it moved he jumped and dropped it. Then he was on the prowl in search of more of “those things”. We spent close to an hour on that rocky shore before heading up to the lighthouse. It was closed by the time we got there, but the view from that cliff was awesome.

We headed back to camp and made a fire to cook our cherry pies in, they were good but we forgot the powdered sugar and so they were not great.

Tired as we were we decided to head to bed and get some rest in something that was not moving… some of us slept great…

Tomorrow is another day...

There and Back Again Pt. 1

A journey through time past

We left Derby, Ks on Wednesday night around 8:30pm. We drove through the night and stopped the next day in Ogden, Ut at the Dinosaur Museum. At this point in the trip we were half way to the redwood forest in California.

We stopped for a picnic and to explore the park. It was a wonderful time with the family of walking laughing and playing together. I realized that we don’t do this enough!! We explored the park and the dinosaurs they had placed through out it and Libby and Ivan were quick to point out the ones that they liked.

It was a nice break from riding in the van for 14 hours. We played there for about 3 hours and then decided it was time to continue our mission. The kids had adequately ran and played and the parents had stretched out and felt that they could travel for another 14 hours. We had survived the dinosaur park and were ready to move on in our trip.

Our trip took us next to an undiscovered part of our nation (for us). Usually at Ogden we would have headed north to Idaho and then west to Oregon, but not this time. The GPS tracking and guidance on my phone came in handy as we charted this new course in an un adventured land. We continued west towards Nevada and then to California, where we would camp for two nights and explore the giant trees…