Day Five - Moving On

Who would have thought that there'd be no Wi-Fi on the coast of California.  Yosemite, no surprise that there's no Wi-Fi; and Sequoia, no surprise.  And no cell phone service either otherwise I could use my hotspot.  This will be a brief summary.

These National Parks are not close together so there's lots of driving like from Diamond Lake to the Redwoods.  We stopped at our favorite woodworking place just before the California border and the kids climbed through the treehouses.

Finally a romp in the redwoods.  What grand trees, so beautiful in their size and height, soaring far beyond what we can see.  We, mainly the grandkids boucned from rock to rock and stump to stump as they ate their sandwiches.  After some time of stretching the legs and worrying the grandparents about falling off logs or boulders, we hit the ranger station.  Oh, yeah, it's time to buy something; we find a reason later..  Only one stuffed animal during the entire trip but it was the place to survey as soon as we were in the doors.  Oh, but there's no rule about buying stuffed animals as gifts for the parents.  Ah ha, a loophole.

Oh, the ocean is so tempting; the girls had never seen one before.  "It's so big.  I love the waves."  First it was a hike up Fern Canyon, then the beach.  Walking the canyon where some of Jurassic Park and Star Wars was filmed wasn't enough, it had to be run and climbed far beyond where Grandma and Grandpa could see and supervise.  They did eventually return.  At the beach the dress and guidelines were bare feet, shorts and wading only.  Evcn though the water only came to the knees, the splash covered the enough body and Riley was hurting from the cold and wet when we stopped things at 6:30, but he probably thought he had impressed the girls adequately with his energy level.

Did I mention that as we rolled out the sleeping bags the night before we discovered that we had under-planned and under-estimated the warmth of one of the sleeping bags and Gail was very cold that night.  Tonight she and Denvy will trade and he will overdress.  That did work.