Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Camping Adventure

Camping is one of my favorite outdoor activities.  My family camped fairly often growing up--both car camping (when you lug all the gear to the campsite in the car) and backpacking (on your back!).  I am thrilled this is an activity that my husband also loved growing up and that we can enjoy together as a couple.

Recently our friends who live in Southern California booked a campsite in the Redwoods area north of San Francisco, and we all met up for a night around the campfire.  This was the first camping trip since our big move, so trying to remember where we had tucked all the camping gear into our much smaller new apartment was the first adventure.


By the time we arrived to the campgrounds after work on Friday, only a few minutes of daylight remained.  The good news is that we are pros at setting up our tent in the dark.


We enjoyed a perfect campfire dinner our friends prepared over the coals, and then we hung out several more hours chatting and roasting marshmallows for s'mores.

 

Morning brought multiple types of coffee and breakfast burritos before we headed our for a hike.

New Orleans Iced Coffee
Camping Stove Espresso!
Drip Coffee and Apple Crisp
Breakfast burritos and fresh fruit
I tried to capture how tall and straight those redwood trees are!
Highlights from the hike included salamander and banana slug sightings, downed redwood trees from a recent storm, and an increasing amount of poison oak on the trail as we neared the end of the hike (lowlight, but luckily no one had reactions!).

Fungi
Redwood trees are so huge they often live through big forest fires.  The trunks blacken and hollow out from the fire, but they continue growing.  These were so cool!


My excitement for camping was renewed, and we've already started thinking about other locations we want to check out.  We might need to take a camping trip down to Southern California next time...


2 comments:

  1. I am so jealous!!! I haven't been camping in way too long. I can't believe you and I only went camping that one time and that the four of us NEVER WENT while we were all in NC. To be remedied in CA asap. Love the pics!

    V

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  2. I echo the jealousy, of everything from being outdoors, eating those delicious-looking breakfast burritos (one of my all-time favorite dishes), and the taste of coffee in the woods. Not to mention--you guys know how to put up a tent in the dark?? Remember how long it used to take us to hitch up the big yellow one? I can still remember how that nylon smelled when it got hot inside. Good times!

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