This week we drove from the Seattle, WA area down the Oregon coast to Crescent City, CA. We woke up at 3:30 in the morning on Tuesday to get an early start and miss the traffic. We hoped the kids would sleep in the car in the wee hours of the morning. They were too excited to sleep at first, then too hungry, then too grumpy to sleep. So it ended up being a VERY long drive, both in terms of time and crankiness! The Oregon coast was beautiful, but driving it was much slower than we expected and you don't really see the ocean very much while you're on the highway. However, the times you do see the ocean the views are spectacular. Even still, if we were to do it again we'd probably save ourselves a few hours of driving and skip the coast.
We stopped at the Tillamook Cheese Factory along the way. Liz and the kids are huge cheese fans, and we took the self-guided tour of the factory and tasted the free samples. We bought Tillamook ice cream cones for everybody, and soon regretted it. The workers messed up our order, Whitney almost lost the ice cream off her cone, when Liz tried to show Whitney how to hold a cone so as to not lose her ice cream, the ice cream fell off of Liz's cone, Brooklyn was screaming hysterically, Michael kept losing his balance and falling down with his cone, ice cream kept getting everywhere including all over Liz, ... Before I had even finished straightening out our order, Liz had had it and rounded up all the kids and took them straight to the car (where ice cream proceeded to get all over everything else). When things had settled down a bit we had a good laugh about it and remembered that when you have your hands full with young kids, something as simple as getting an ice cream cone can be a major undertaking!
We finally made it to our beach house in Crescent City and had a blast! The beach was a block away, and the kids just couldn't get enough of it. They'd play there all morning, come back to the house for some lunch, and go back and play all afternoon or evening. There is a lighthouse that is only accessible during low tide, so we visited the lighthouse and the nearby tide pools, finding all kinds of hermit crabs and sea snails. The current lighthouse caretaker and his wife are volunteers for the summer and have a special vehicle that can get them to and from the lighthouse at high tide in an emergency. The caretaker said of course he uses the vehicle responsibly, but joked it's amazing how many emergencies you can come up with when you have access to such a fun vehicle.
The redwood forest was only minutes away as well, so we spent half a day hiking among the huge trees, climbing the fallen ones, and even drove through a particularly large tree on our last day. We had so much fun in Crescent City we ended up staying an extra day. It's a quiet little area with so much to do and not crowded at all. One of the mornings we had the whole beach virtually all to ourselves. The only real downside was finding a mouse in the master bedroom as we were getting ready for bed! I caught it with a cooking pot and a baking sheet, and let it go out by the road. The house was clean and well maintained so we're still not sure how it got in there, perhaps through an open window is our guess.
We continued our drive down the coast to San Jose to spend some time with my parents. Our drive took us across the beautiful Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. We spent more time listening to the Harry Potter books on CD. Our oldest two children are finally old enough to get into the books, so we've been listening to the first few books and then watching the movies (fast forwarding through any parts that are too scary). We've made it through the first two books and movies so far.
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| Tillamook Cheese Factory |
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| "Five little monkeys sleeping in a bed. One fell out and bumped her head." |
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| Splashing in the ocean in their clothes |
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| Catching more waves (in swimsuits this time) |
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| Plenty of sand to go around |
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| Whitney the mermaid |
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| Daddy and Mikey on our way to the lighthouse |
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| Stout Grove in Jedediah Smith Redwood State Park |
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| Driving through a tree |
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| Approaching the Golden Gate Bridge |
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