Day 30

We were up early again today to hike but today we had a special visitor! I was excited to see my cousin Chris that I hadn't seen in about 6 years and the kids were excited to see his two dogs! He is known in our family as Little Chris since he is 10 years younger than my brother, Big Chris - both Chris Bloombergs. He told the kids it was his rapper name which of course they thought was hilarious.

The kids all thought the dogs were adorable and the dogs definitely enjoyed the attention. I was too busy petting and getting licked to even get a picture!

The dogs were secured in the cars since they aren't allowed on most trails here and we were off. It's strange to me to be able to leave them in a car in the summer but it was only 65 degrees and they were parked in the shade too. I could get used to this weather!

The trail to Marymere Falls was only about a mile so Chris and I were able to catch up while the kids listened intently. They are always wanting to hear stories of family or of when Big Chris and I were younger.

Before we knew it we were standing at the falls! The trail was busy with it being so short and easy, but the falls were lovely.

At one of the overlooks we were excited to spot a Dipper bird. The only reason we noticed him was because he appeared to be dancing on a rock near the river. This bird can actually dive underwater for food. We'd learned about this guy in the park's movie and got to watch him dip in and out of the water first hand. 

Once we made it back to the car we decided to hike an area we knew dogs to join us. A few years back a dam was removed which ended up washing out a road so it is closed to vehicle traffic. Lucky for us it now allows dogs!

There were many signs warning limited parking and ability for turnaround so Grammie decided to go back to her campground and ride with us. Lola wasn't thrilled with having to compete with two other dogs!

Our first trail was to Madison Falls just one-tenth of a mile long. Little Chris's dogs Biscuit and Walter were thrilled to be out on the trail wanting to smell and climb everything! Lola was a bit more cautious trying to figure out who these additions to our group were.

Next we decided on a trail that looked to be about 3-4 miles and were hoping we could break the rules and little and let the dogs off leash. There were rangers at the falls trail but once we were out of their eyesight we took leashes off and the dogs figured out how to get along. Walter and Biscuit were curious about Lola but they basically showed her they didn't care and were more interested in running and exploring so she joined in. The kids enjoyed leading the way with Walter and Biscuit!

This hike was pretty steep in places so I knew this would be it for Grammie. We decided on an early dinner at her campground. Little Chris decided to head on to Cape Flattery that we'd visited the day before so we said our goodbyes and were hopeful they could join us again soon.

The kids had been looking forward to spending some afternoon time at Grammie's campground since our first day. It was equipped with corn hole, volleyball/badmitton, basketball, horseshoes, and ladderball. Ryan and Brayden were set on having an Olympic competition. And if you know them, you know competition can be the worst thing or the best thing. Much of this trip I've been saying to them, "It's not the Olympics, it's just a game!" during our family game nights. Well, now it's the Olympics.

Laney wasn't interested so I sent her with the camera to document the games. I prepped dinner instead and had a chance to use the wifi and go through my mass of email messages.

Once Laney returned and didn't complain of any fights I returned to the Olympics with the camera. On the way I just had to stop for some photos of the garden in the campground. Not only where there all these beautiful flowers but a large fruit and vegetable garden that anyone could grab whatever they wanted! There was everything from raspberries and strawberries to peppers, tomatoes and squash. Many of the flowers nestled in with these plants I'd never seen before.

The kids returned hungry so we had a feast of the juiciest peaches on the planet, broccoli cheese soup, salad, and grilled cheese on Seattle sourdough. We were stuffed! The kids were anxious to play volleyball so we talked Laney into joining us. We were terrible but we added the ability to hit it after a bounce and did much better. Grammie spotted Ryan on the ground most of the time!

The kids claim they have a separate dessert stomach so I gave them the fixings for s'mores. They tried to negotiate for cupcakes too but their logic was all off.

I brought all the kids back with me tonight because Grammie would be taking a trip to Victoria Island in the morning. She had an early ferry so we would be spending the day without her. We all smooshed into the big tent bundled up in our sleeping bags and quilts to enjoy another cold night.

Day 16

Our wonderful day the day before wasn't perfect. Shortly after lunch my check engine light came on.  We have a bunch of miles ahead of us on this trip so we decided to drive in to the Monterey area to get it looked at. But first we enjoyed our view once again with pancakes!

They didn't have time for us right away so we drove down to Cannery Row in Monterey to look around for an hour. Once we got back they said it was going to take a few hours and offered us a shuttle ride to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. I'd always heard amazing things about this place so we took the opportunity to check it out!

Our first stop was the jellyfish as Grammie had heard about them already. The room was dark and the jellyfish were mesmerizing! We all thought it would have been a good idea just to have a room full of benches because we just want to sit down and watch them gracefully swoosh around their aquariums.  I tried to talk Grammie into replacing her giant bookcase with a jellyfish aquarium. Hopefully she's considering it. Aren't these baby jellies just adorable?

Living in a beach area ourselves the kids knew a lot of what was being taught here. My kids have been raised on reusable bags and containers so some of the single use plastics just seem strange to them.  We've enjoyed recycled plastic sculptures at several museums but had never seen on quite this small.





The amount of plastic in the water is astounding. We were shocked to see just how much was found in an albatross's stomach!

Our next stop was the open sea area where you could watch all the animals swimming their laps in the 3-story aquarium. The girls loved the turtles the best!








The touch tank area was pretty crowded but the kids did get to see real west coast seaweed. It's huge compared to our Gulf seaweed. The girls held a hermit crab and touched a few anemone. I told them we would hopefully be visiting a few tide pool areas soon so they got very excited.







We were just in time at the penguin exhibit to watch a feeding and learn a little bit. The penguins there were African penguins and they were ready to eat for sure! We learned all about their markings and the aquarium's program to bring the animals back from threatened status by pairing strong genetic penguins together. A baby penguin is officially on my birthday list now.

We had just enough time to make it to the sea otter exhibit for their program. While the staff talked the otters completed the tasks they were supposed to do in order to receive the fish. Most of the tasks were health related so the otters were used to the trainers touching and evaluating them. And of course a baby otter is on my birthday list too.

I received a phone call about my car after the show. It could have been a couple different things - none of which I had time to hang around and fix because they would need to be ordered. We headed to a movie about a local orphan otter and I searched for auto care centers near my next spot while we waited for it to start. The stress of trying to stay on the road was getting to me!

After the movie we walked down to the shops for a few minutes while we waited for the shuttle to come grab us. The kids decided to spend some of their money they get each week from Dave in the candy store.  They generously shared with me on the ride back.




While I cooked dinner the girls decided to play cards with Ryan's new addition to her traveling stuffed animals. She named her "Luna" after the orphan in the movie and apparently was able to teach her how to play cards!

Tonight I not only prepped the car for leaving the next day but also for spending hours at the car repair place on the way to our next spot. I planned to stop in San Jose hoping that a bigger city might
have the parts my car needed. Our trips aren't always fun & games!

Day 23

I was up before the sun this morning - ready for my favorite hike. There was color peeking through the trees so I walked down to the lake to see the view. The whole way I was looking out for the bear but I ended up being startled by the dang deer again!

I didn't have to wake the kids up early this morning! They were so excited about our hike they were up helping me get things ready. We grabbed our to-go breakfasts and got on the road to the park.

My GPS is super happy about sending me on windy side roads so it took us  a little longer than I expected. Once we got there I noticed the summit was in the clouds so we took our time exploring the nature center and checking out the animals. The girls fell in love with the otters. It's a good thing they learned in their endangered animals class this year about what adopting these animals really means as I'm not sure I would have been able to talk them out of bringing one of these cute guys home!

We took the opportunity to visit the swinging bridge before the hike. It was unbelievably windy so the bridge was singing too as we walked across. It was moving so much many people wouldn't even go across! I'd noticed the trail head was roped off with a closed sign so I popped into the store to ask about it. The ladies inside said someone probably forgot to open it and we could just go ahead. They laughed at the look on my face and assured me there wasn't any reason why the trail would be closed.

Here they are all smiles before! I decided to add on hiking the extension trail from the lower parking lot as the trail to Macrae Peak was only about a mile. The kids still had bears on the brain so they made me lead until we made it to the Grandfather Mountain trail and they spotted the trail markers over big boulders. Finding their way climbing over boulders was definitely one of their favorite things so I almost got left behind!

Some of the climbs are so steep we have to scale ladders and use ropes to make it up sheer rock faces. The kids LOVED it!

This was a triple set of ladders that seemed to never end. See Brayden up there by the tree?

At this last ladder I had to give them some instructions that I thought may make them a little nervous including them not being more than an arm's reach away from me. They rolled their eyes and climbed to the top.

We had a mile-high lunch and I passed out the M&Ms I'd bought the day before. We checked for cell service and called Dave while we relaxed. He told each of them about the time I'd made him hike this with me after enjoying it so much with Grammie.

We sat together enjoying the view, spotting the parkway down below and feeding the birds some of our breadcrumbs. We talked about them joining me on longer backpacking hikes before they get too old and busy for me!

We talked about continuing on as the hike had been so fun so far but the wind was picking up and fog was quickly moving our way so we decided to head back the way we came. It was a good decision as just about 5 minutes after we started down we were surrounded by fog and wind was whipping around us.

We made it back down to the bottom without much incident. They were even smiling at the end!

Ryan made sure to capture this picture for me as I explained the movie to everyone. I added another movie to my list to preview to see if they could watch it any time soon. Next up was ice cream of course! There weren't any amazing flavors so we just settled for the regular - chocolate and cookies & cream and dark cherry for me. It was a good stop for t-shirts for everyone too.

Then of course we had to go back to visit the animals. This section of the park was getting pretty crowded but we did get to see the cougar which had been hiding earlier. The kids wanted to bring Emily and Evey back some fudge so we stopped in to pick up a few squares for all of us to share and headed back to our site.

We rested for a few minutes before jumping back into kayaks to explore again. Laney buddied up with me in a double and the rest went solo. Ryan claimed we were faster because we had two people but we were pushing two people around and our kayak was almost double the size of hers! Always a competition with that girl. She and Evey did enjoy rescuing us when we and Brayden bottomed out on rocks and sandbars a couple times. We had to get to shallow waters to show Brayden the giant tadpoles!

After dinner we headed to the picnic area with fudge to share. For two days we'd heard about these "blue ghost" lightning bugs and everyone told us to go to the picnic area to find them. We opted out of our traditional walk around the campground the night before leaving to see if we could spot these very strange sounding bugs. We had zero luck but did enjoy spotting our pregnant deer and regular lightning bugs. I added "blue ghosts" to our list of things we needed to google when we got service. Go ahead, search it - they're cool!

Day 39

We woke up early and had a quick breakfast before we left for the National Zoo. All my kids are crazy about animals, but Ryan is most of all. During our last visit at the Museum of American History we'd heard about some unique sculptures using plastic that had washed up on the shores of the Atlantic. I had no idea quite how huge and beautiful they would be!

    

As we walked through the zoo we kept seeing more and more. The part the kids loved most was getting a close up look at all the things that made up each sculpture. There were flip flops, paint brushes, bottle tops, coolers, toys, tires, funnels, bouys, and so much more. It was really astounding to see just what floats around in our oceans.

  

I believe we only saw about half of the sculptures but we were definitely inspired to look into finding ways to reuse more of our plastic.  The zoo does a fantastic job of recycling all the plastic they collect to use it for energy. In fact, one statistic I saw noted that a light bulb can be powered for six hours from a single plastic bottle.

And then of course there were the animals. We were there for the pandas, but kept getting side tracked by all the other adorable animals we found on the way. The small mammals got us all for sure!

                

Laney mentioned she will be having at least half of the animals we saw when she has her own apartment. She is planning to live in New York City, so I'm not sure how that's really going to work out. Perhaps she'll just work at a zoo.

After a long walk uphill we finally made it to the pandas. We met 3 year old Bao Bao, 1 year old Bei Bei, and their parents Mei Xiang and Tian Tian. All the adults were too busy eating to pay any attention to anything but the bamboo, but Bei Bei was having a blast playing and rolling around.

   

Ryan remembered keep tabs on the babies born at the Atlanta Zoo a few years before with live video interviews and web cams, so she told the other two all about how the biologists track their daily activities. 

I handed the camera over to Ryan for the rest of the walk down through the other side of the zoo. We enjoyed watching the sea lions for quite a while as they were very excited to see their handler handing out snacks.

After traveling through the Amazon rain forest and a Virginia farm we decided to opt for ice cream for lunch. I don't even know how the kids each finished one of the cones we bought filled with ice cream, brownies, m&ms, fudge, and marshmallows. It was definitely refreshing and enjoyable to sit in the air conditioning for awhile.

Our walk from the train that morning was wonderfully cool and downhill the entire way. It was now at least 25 degrees warmer and even with our refreshing snack none of us were looking forward to the walk back so we opted for an Uber ride to the Newseum. Our wonderful driver even had a charging stick as we didn't have any options for recharging anything at our campground and my phone was down to 2%. 

We walked back into the Newseum determined to do all the fun stuff today and we all absolutely had a blast.  A docent caught us with some very strange objects as we walked in.  I wish I had video of the kids trying to work a rotary phone. When she asked Brayden to make a phone call he just stared at it with absolutely no clue whatsoever what to do. Ryan tried to push the numbers instead of dial the phone. 

When Laney made a mistake typing I told her there was no way to correct it and she would just have to wad up the paper, throw it against the wall and start over. She just stared at me like I was speaking German.

We all spent the next few hours learning about journalism and how to get the scoop. We also learned about the ethics and legalities in reporting tough or revealing stories as well as conflicts of interest. The best part was watching the kids be a breaking news reporter with different stories happening in the city.

 

Once they finished their report they could come down from the green screen and see the report as if it were live on the news. I practically had to tear them away after they'd all had several turns.

Our culminating experience was a game we could play against each other trying to decide if we should print certain stories or pursue certain leads. We played several times and mixed up the teams learning all about real life journalism situations. It was perfect end to our visit for this game family to show what we'd learned!

After a quick visit to the gift shop we hopped on the train back to the campground to play and have a quiet dinner. We'd be leaving the next day after we went to a little surprise I had for the kids!