travel log: prairie creek redwoods state park

We arrived at our campground in the afternoon on Monday. We had a fabulous little site- very lush and secluded from the other sites with greenery all around. As we were setting up the tent we felt some very light rain, but we didn't get fully rained on until during the night, which worked out fine. We had a few damp spots on the floor of the tent but nothing major, and the rain did not keep us from our plans during the day, which was nice.



In the morning, we took a hiking trail through the woods to the visitor's center. It was just beautiful and we all had a lot of fun seeing all the huge trees and meeting new creatures like snails and banana slugs. Then, after we found somebody to give the van a jump (and after resolving never to let Stella watch DVDs when the van is not running again...) we set out to explore the coastal part of the area. The view from the cliffs was breathtaking, and such a different landscape than we are used to at the beach- with large trees so near to the shore. We got to see plenty of Elk quite close up at the beach, and later we even had a VERY close encounter (almost too close, really) with a group of bucks at an intersection near our campground. We hiked the path through Fern Canyon, which was truly amazing, and went down close to the water to check out the beach. Hazel got a bit too close and got tipped into the water by a wave, but fortunately was able to get right back up. That freaked me out a little (we had heard about some nasty rogue waves in the area and I was starting to get twitchy just having them in the super shallow water) and made her very uncomfortable, since she was fully dressed. Lyle liked the sand but did not like how it felt/tasted when he put it in his mouth.



We had a nice evening, making s'mores and hot chocolate after dinner and I even got to take a shower after I got the littles asleep. We packed up everything we could before we went to bed, and woke up before dawn to load the kids in the van and throw the tent into the trailer. We had a looooong day of driving to get up to Tacoma, and we wanted to get a good start. Everyone really does surprisingly well when we do this- they all usually go right back to sleep and we can get a few hours down the road before we are ready to stop and eat breakfast.

Here are the pictures from this leg of the trip- which you can also view in our Prairie Creek Redwoods photoset on Flickr. Enjoy!