Camping, trees and meteors

Day 2 of Vacation Dad's reign started with frantic packing for camping! We were a little behind as there was a long power cut on Sunday night so a lot of food prep did not get done. But we hustled and were out of the door only a couple of hours behind schedule! We were headed to King's Canyon National Park - which is right next door to Sequoia National Park. Our friends had already booked to go to Sequoia but we were able to align our schedules and bookings so that we could all go together - way more fun for the kids!

The campsite was interesting. I liked it - big rocks dotted about a pine forest. It was really pretty! Jeff wasn't too impressed - mostly because the only space big enough for our giant tent was on a slope. That made life a little interesting! We spent the first night slowly sliding off the air mattress, and having to periodically shimmy back up to the top. We switched positions with the kids the next night... but then the same thing was happening to them! I woke up in the middle of the night one night and did the check down the line of sleeping heads - kid, kid, empty mattress, kid....  it's always Kate. Every time we go camping we have to have a conversation with Kate about how she's not allowed out of the tent at night without a parent (there have been a couple of early morning escape attempts). Before full blown panic set in I found her - she had slid down off her mattress and was huddled under Nicholas' feet on his mattress!

On our first day there we set off to find sequoias. Our campsite was literally across the road from Grant's Grove which has the third biggest tree in the world (by mass, not the tallest). So we went off to see it! It is hard to describe just how immense these trees are. The pictures don't do them justice at all. They are just massive.

After Grant's Grove we decided to hike to Big Stump - one of the leaflets the park service hand out when you arrive showed a historical picture of the Big Stump (a logged sequoia) with a ladder up the side to get to the top, and so foolishly we were looking for that particular feature on the trail. We never found it! We did find several big stumps - pretty enormous stumps they were too! The kids had a great time climbing all over them.

But we were not convinced that these were the stumps we were looking for so we kept on... I 'm so glad we did, because further down the trail we found the most gorgeous little open meadow. It was so pretty, with long grasses and wild flowers everywhere. It was the site of a logging mill from the 1890s, and there were five or six big stumps in the meadow, so we called it good and headed back to camp for lunch.

There was evidence of the drought everywhere - trees are dying all over the forest. It was sad to see.

 

On the way we stopped to see how many people it would take to stretch around a living sequoia - this is one of my favourite pictures of our trip. They weren't even half way around the tree!!

The afternoon found us down at the other end of Sequoia National Park to see the biggest tree in the world, the General Sherman tree. It was an unbelievable size!
 

We're tiny!!

There were many more sequoias down at this end of the park. Grant's Grove where we started out in the morning is an isolated little grove of seqouias but down at this end of the park they were dotted about all over the landscape, so despite the hour's drive on windy mountain roads that it took to get there, I am glad we went.

The kids particularly enjoyed driving our car through the Tunnel Log - not something you do every day!

Camping is a lot of hard work... the campsite was so dry it was the dustiest and dirtiest we've ever been while camping!

Just look at those legs!

Usually by day 2 I'm wondering why we bother - and then we sit out around the campfire at night and watch the sky, and it is all worth it. We had an amazing view of the sky. It was so clear we could see the Milky Way. On our second night there, I had a whole crew of kids on a bathroom run, so we were down at the bottom of the hill. I was quite late, about 9:30 I think, and we had just left the bathroom and were starting to walk up the hill when someone in the campsite started yelling. You could hear it spread through the whole campsite - site by site people joined in and pretty soon the whole campsite was yelling and howling. One of the kids asked me what was going on and I said 'I don't know! Midnight yell?' and then Adam said 'Look at that!' and just took off running. I looked up to see a giant fireball screaming across the sky. It was big enough that we could see it flaming, and it had ten or twelve little smoke trails behind it... clearly smaller pieces that had broken off whatever it was. It was the most amazing thing I've ever seen! The whole campsite yelled and screamed until it passed over, which took a long time. It looked like every disaster movie you've ever seen and I honestly thought that when it landed it was going to wipe out Seattle or something.... I've never seen anything like it in my life and probably never will again. While I thought it was a meteor it was amazing but apparently it was Chinese space junk burning up on re-entry.... less impressive but still quite a sight. And the Delta Aquarid meteor shower the next night was fun to watch too!