Northern California, then Nevada

Redwood Forest in Klamath, California

Well, it's time to do some catching up again.  We're in Carson City, Nevada now and will be staying until Saturday morning.  The plan is to travel to San Francisco on Saturday.  More about that later......first let me tell you what we've been doing for the last week.

On Tuesday, September 7th we traveled from Eugene, Oregon to Klamath, California.  Klamath is in northern California just south of Crescent City.  It's such a beautiful place.  There are mountains and HUGE redwoods and it's all just down the road from the beach.  What could be better? 

Pictures and words just can't do justice to how magnificent these trees are.  Just the idea of standing under something that's been here since the Ice Age is incredible.  Just look at this picture.  The girls look so small and I couldn't even get the bottom of the trees or the canopy in the shot.  We were all impressed.  (Mickey and I more so than the girls. They thought the redwoods were cool, but got tired of looking at them pretty quickly.  While Mickey and I could have spent days just driving and looking at trees.) 

Mickey said the redwood were some of the most awesome things he'd ever seen.   Many were 200 - 300 foot tall and 60 - 80 feet around.

                                         Here's us driving through a redwood near Klamath, California.



Exploring the tide pools near Crescent City, California.

We spent two evenings exploring the tide pools at the beach near Crescent City.  The weather was cool, in the 50s, and it was pretty foggy as you can see in the picture above.  We saw lots of small crab, one big crab, and tons of sea anemones.  The girls liked exploring the beach so much on the first evening, that's all they wanted to do the next day.  But, they stayed focused and we had school all day, then we hit the beach again.

Look closely and you can see a large crab and several small ones.

Here's a sea anemone.  They look like plants, but they're really meat-eating animals.





Here's a sea anemone eating a crab leg. 

We also visited the Battery Point Lighthouse in Crescent City.  It's one of the few remaining manned, operational lighthouses in existence.   Battery Point Lighthouse is manned by volunteers who live there for a month at a time, taking care of the lighthouse and giving tours.

We stayed in the Klamath / Crescent City area for four days before moving on to Reno, Nevada on Saturday, September 11th.  We took the girls to dinner at Circus Circus before setting up camp.





Cruising Lake Tahoe

On Sunday evening we took a sightseeing cruise aboard  the Woodwind II, a catamaran on Lake Tahoe.  Sailing at 6200 feet in the High Sierra Mountains,  we were on the "Largest-Highest Sailboat" in the word!  The sunset on the lake was beautiful.  We arrived back in dock at dark and just in time to see the International Space Station pass over head.