Hitting the road…

We began our farewell tour with a two day drive down the northwest coastline, heading for San Francisco. It’s a big drive, so we broke it up over two and a half days, with two nights camping out. We haven’t done a lot of camping as a family, but will spend quite a few nights on this road trip under canvas. I have to say that we got off to a pretty good start.

There were endless beautiful vistas and sights as we made our way to our first destination, Sunset Bay State Park…

The girls took the business of setting up camp very seriously, each taking on specifically assigned duties. Olive was Richard’s trusty tent setting up assistant, whilst Edie ably got all the camp mattresses inflated and installed inside the tent. I was relegated to assembling a couple of camp beds, which even I, with my thorough lack of camping nous, was able to pull off.

Once camp Croad was up and running we spent the rest of the evening enjoying the delights of Sunset Bay.

Despite being awoken in the early hours by our nearest neighbor’s crying infant, we all managed to get a decent night’s sleep and were quickly up and back on the road for the next leg of the journey. Before continuing south, we made a quick detour to check out the seal colony you can find just north of the park. We weren’t quite sure how many seals to expect, but as soon as we opened the car doors we were hit with an overwhelming cacophony of bellows and brays…let’s just say there were quite a few seals!

We were all very excited about our next stop – a chance to sleep amongst the giant redwoods in California’s Humboldt Redwoods State Park. It didn’t disappoint. Because the night was so warm, we were able to leave the fly off the tent and sleep looking up at a canopy of intertwining branches…magic.

I’m writing this from the beach front in Tulum, Mexico. We are coming to the end of a very special week here, about which I’ll blog next. Tomorrow it’s back to San Francisco and then on to Yosemite…the adventure continues!