Happy Father's Day!

(Good reason to eat and ice cream cake ;)..)
Happy Father's Day to all the Papas out there!

A little bit crazy these days....

"Self portrait" by Solomon ( I love finding pictures he has taken:)

Sorry I have been kind of M.I.A. over here. Things have been so busy with the last few days of school and now summer vacation is in full swing. Our main laptop bit the dust yesterday when Sollie threw a wooden block at the screen and it turned into a big black spiderweb....ouch.

So my connection to the internet is very limited.

Sophie is headed off for a vacation to the other side of the country to visit her grandparents in a few days. I have never been away from her for more than a night so we will see how she does and how mama does. I am sure she will have a ton of fun with two sets of grandparents to spoil her rotten. She might not want to come home....

Small beauties...

Another roadside attraction.......

This makes me sad, poor tree. But alas I am a hypocrite since I paid 5 bucks to drive through it. How is this tree healthy with a giant hole chainsawed through it?

And across the road...

Emus!
I was reading the brochure for the tree and thought it said "Come see our Emus(rhymes with male body part)" , and I was like "Ben what is an Emus?" Duh.


We cant forget these guys...

Paul and Babe. These guys were huge. Notice the little girl on his shoe. When we got there he was having a conversation with her. It was cute. Sophie was super shy and made us promise that we wouldn't make her talk to him. Imagine having that guys job...shouting hi to all the tourists and talking to little kids all day.



This picture pretty much sums up the nastiness of this bathroom.
Getting sick of our vacation photos yet?

Animal friends.....by land and by sea

Can you spot the Sea Lions?

Here is a closer look...

Yes this is an Emu (more on that later).

We saw two large herds of Elk. Both times they were standing in the middle of the road. The first batch was on a back road to a coastal hiking trail and the second herd with huge males was standing in the middle of Hwy 101 right beyond a sharp turn. I pulled over and got a few blurry shots.

I am relieved we saw no bears. I love bears but never want to cross paths with one while hiking with my children.

Most Beautiful Pacific....

You didn't really think I wasn't going to overload my blog with our trip photos did you? Well, In fact I took so many I had to break them up into categories. Yes, I am a picture junky. When I was in High School I dreamed of becoming a photographer for National Geographic. It is so beautiful on the West Coast it is easy to take great pictures. The first four photographs are near Crescent City, California, after that the photos are near Bandon, Oregon.

Under Giants...

We just spent a few days down in California to visit the Redwoods for our 10th Anniversary. This trail is called the Damnation Creek trail and took us through majestic Redwood groves down to the Ocean. The trail was steep and fun going down but going up was another matter. It is a 4 mile round trip hike and the last 1. 4 miles drops 1,000 feet from the forest to the Ocean. I carried Sollie up in the backpack most of the way back up and man that was a workout. It was a beautiful hike and I highly recommend it if you ever find yourself in the Del Norte Coast Redwoods.