Day Thirty Five

We had a relaxing day. No hurrying from place to place. There were only two objectives on the list. Our first stop was at a commercial site called Trees of Mystery. I hear you saying tourist trap. You are right. The statues of Paul Bunyan and Babe the blue ox are certainly designed to get people to pull off highway 101, especially if there are kids in the car. Well, apparently there are two kids in our car. After the photo op we signed up for the gondola ride to the top. There was a nice hike through the woods. This forest includes a lot of very large Sitka Spruce. The gondola ride to the top was fun. We like riding on things. We looked around from the viewpoint, but not much to see because of the fog. We took the ride back down and continued the hike which took us by some chainsaw sculptures which were quite good. We ate lunch in the car then headed out.

Our ultimate objective was the Stout Memorial Grove. We did a quick stop at the Crescent Beach Overlook which was nice, but some sunshine would have made the photography better. The Stout Grove provided a nice hike amongst some really big redwoods. There also seemed to be quite a few fallen trees of various ages. We ran into a young Ranger there who was from my hometown of Downers Grove. He went to South high, I went to North. I probably graduated 45 years before he did.

We finished quite early in the afternoon and decided to take some downtime for a couple important maintenance items: an oil change and laundry. Every once in a while you just have to take a breather. Tomorrow we start the way back home via Hillsboro for Ginny's 50th high school reunion weekend then on to Houston with several stops in between.

Today's photo is of us in full tourist trap mode. It really was fun.