To the trees.

This was my first time seeing the California redwoods. We only decided last-minute to drive down the coast over the state line because it was pouring rain, and we were back to the drawing board, scribbling frantically to write up a new vacation after our camping trip literally drowned. “Why not?” I asked. “We’re only an hour or so from the state line.” It was just over an hour to Jedidah Smith Redwood State Park, two hours to Redwood National and State Park, so we ventured to both.

First off, the drive down Pacific Coast Scenic Highway 101 is simply one of the best road trips. The views are of such magnitude that I felt we should have to pay money for them. The coast is visible through sporadic stretches of rainforest, and each view offers something unique to the previous one. It was the perfect drizzly day for a leisurely drive sipping a latte from Port Orford’s Battle Rock Coffee and listening to the sounds of Johnny Swim.

We’ve only ever seen the parts of California that are visible through the windows of LAX, and Northern California is really more like an extension of southern Oregon than Los Angeles. It’s BEAUTIFUL, and when you start seeing the redwoods above your dashboard, it just keeps getting better and better.

We drove through Jedidiah Smith State Park, which is a beautiful stretch of road and then got back on the 101 past Crescent City to make it to Redwood National Park. Around Klamath, we found the Trees of Mystery attraction, where you can enjoy a treetop skyrail tour of a redwood forest; we opted instead for a picture with the true-to-legend-scale monuments of Paul Bunyan and his trusty ox, Babe, and a round through the gift shop, where we decided commemorative lapel pins made sufficient and inexpensive souvenirs for the kids. (I paid, and the kids paid me back with their money when we got to the car; at this point, Eva learned a hard lesson in commerce and expressed she didn’t like that I took all her money (a dollar and some change) and tried to give me back the lapel pin. Poor girl. As it turns out, she likes how her shiny Babe ox pin adorns her pink sparkly backpack after all.)

Klamath, California, is also home to the tourist trap, The Tour-thru Tree, through which we paid five bucks to discover our massive Ford Expedition would not in fact fit. We snapped a picture anyway and decided a $5 bill was a small price to pay for the laughs and the memory. (That’s what you get when you trust an attraction that can’t spell.)

Then came the elk. And I mean, a LOT of elk. We pulled over to watch them until so many other cars did the same that the elk began to spook. I never get tired of seeing deer and elk, and it was a nice surprise for Kelley’s birthday, considering every other plan I’d made got rained out.

The kind of velvet I love to see.

While our GPS Maps app led us to a key-card-access-only gated road several miles into the Redwood National Park, and we didn’t venture any further south to find another route, we did pull over at the Lady Bird Johnson grove area, which featured a beautiful mile and a half or so walk through the forest. It was raining, we were wearing the wrong kind of shoes, and I discovered my apparent fear of bears and cougars, but once we got over the irritation of being unprepared and resigned ourselves to getting drenched and muddy, we soaked up not only the rain but every inch of the trail we traversed; the kids made forts out of the massive trunks of the redwood clusters and hid in hollowed out trees.

Like snowflakes and fingerprints, each redwood has a completely unique bark pattern, and when I imagine how many redwoods there are in the United States, the thought alone leaves me breathless and full of wonder and gratitude. And my life has been like the bark on those trees—knotted in places, rough and broken in others, aimlessly winding and curving occasionally, but still always coming back to the path upward.

After we got cleaned up from our hike, we ate a picnic lunch beachside just south of Orick, California, before heading back up the coast to our hotel in Gold Beach. (We snagged a beachfront balcony view room last-minute at the Pacific Reef Hotel and Light Show. Though the light show was slightly anti-climatic, the place didn’t disappoint.)

My one regret is that we never did find a place to drive through a redwood, which I feel like is a quintessential thing to do when one visits a park like this. But maybe I’m thinking of the sequoias? Next time we’ll find the bigger trees and perhaps drive a smaller vehicle. Nonetheless, I consider this one item checked off our bucket list!