Seriously, not what I expected summer in Cali to be like.

So, on 7/10 we arrived at our next campground in the Redwoods of Northern CA.  We are about 11 miles south of the OR border.  We got here about 7pm.  Chuck went to check in and no one was there. They had a bunch of packets with names taped to the door but ours wasn't one of them.  I was checking my iPad for other campgrounds nearby while he was trying to call them.  From somewhere a woman showed up with a key to the office and got it sorted out.  The campsites are pretty roomy here, but as always the wi-fi could be better. This place bills itself as a "resort" but I'm not sure what the qualifications are for that.

There is a fog over the whole area all the time.  I think it got up to 62 (that is F for my one international reader) yesterday and has been 57-59 today.  Anything left outside is soaked in the morning.  Finally we're at a place we could give Ellie a bath (which I did this morning because she was really dusty) but there was no sun to dry her quickly.

We have some Redwoods here in the campground, but yesterday we did a drive through a big area of some.  I'm not sure we've actually made it into Redwoods NP.  There are 2 state parks here, too, and the lady at the visitor center told us they are run cooperatively.  She also said the state parks have better trees because they opened first and were able to preserve more.  We went on a dirt road (just in the Jeep!) through Jedidiah Smith State Park.  I have literally never seen anything like what we saw here. Huge, tall trees everywhere.  We did several walking trails and went through one grove that had fallen trees all over the place.  We also found a river that had a very wide bed, but is at a low stage right now. Zack is all about the wading in freezing water.

Ellie says hey.

Zack immediately taking his shoes off for wading. 

We decided it was very squatchy here.

Hard to see in this pic, but these leave very large holes when they fall.

Yep, that's the bottom.

Today we had a little trouble getting motivated.  We ended up driving to a beach a couple of miles from the campground that we had found yesterday.  You could drive onto the beach, so of course we did. There still wasn't any sunshine, though the sun broke through for a few minutes after we'd been there a while.  There were a lot of rocks, but we cleared out most from a small section so we could play beach soccer.  Keeping my soccer injury streak alive (that is an injury for every single time I play), I kicked a rock and sliced a dime-sized piece of skin off my big toe.  Well, it didn't come completely off, it glued itself back over some sand and blood.  I got it cleaned off as best I could, but I will spare y'all a picture.