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Passports Not Hallpasses

Family of Four Traveling the World, Exploring New Countries and Learning a Lot Along the Way

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Caves in Pinnacles National Park

We made the drive from Sequoia to Pinnacles. It went faster than I expected primarily due to books on tape. We arrived fairly late in the day, so we decided to park in the national park. It was the first time we had parked in a national park, and I was shocked at the price of the space. At $37 per night, I expected full hookups. Instead, we were paying to not have full electric (30A versus 50A) and no sewage. As such, we decided to maximize our time there.

Since Pinnacles National Park is the newest of the national parks (thanks, Obama), it is relatively unknown and small. As soon as we arrived and parked, the kids were able to do their junior rangers, and we took off on a hike.

It was near 5:30pm, and the planned hike was only 3.5 miles.

The scenery was pretty spectacular.

I sort of expected this to be the most challenging thing of our hike. It turns out I was wrong.

Pinnacles is known to be a climbers park. I guess I should’ve been more prepared. We hiked for about 1.5  hours before we came to the highlight of the trip: caves created by fallen boulders. The trail went right through the caves. There was no lighting or handrails or steps or even ladders. In fact, the only warning given was a small sign that indicated you should have a flashlight to continue. I figured we had our cell phone flashlights, that would be good enough, right? So we continued.

The last known picture of us just before we descended into the caves. I was still smiling at this point.

About ten minutes into defending into black caves and holes (always waiting on an earthquake to kill us all), Scott’s cell phone died. We were in pitch black with only my cell phone light. So we would go five or six steps/climbs/drops, and then pass the phone back to the next family member. It was fun and scary and exciting all at the same time. Of course we made it out and hiked the trail back to the car. After the caves, the bucks and rabbits didn’t even make an impression.

Later that evening, we heard noise coming from the truck. It sounded like someone was breaking into it. We turned on all the lights outside of the RV but the noise continued. It turned out that raccoons had found our dog food supply in the tub in the back of the pickup. They were not scared of humans at all. Scott managed to jump into the truck and lower the automatic tailgate. When they wouldn’t leave, he slowly drove off which scared them enough to get out of the pickup. We took the dog food in and didn’t see them again the rest of the night.

We knew the rest of the park wouldn’t hold a candle to that hike, so we decided to go ahead and work our ways towards Lassen Volcanic National Park the next morning.

King’s Canyon and Sequoia National Parks

From Yosemite, we headed back south towards King’s Canyon.

We were eager to get away from the RV parks, so we had done quite a lot of research on places where a huge RV can park in the national forest. After confirming with one of the forest rangers, we decided to park in between King’s Canyon and Sequoia national parks in the Sequoia National Forest near Hume.

Kitty Itty Bitty enjoyed her many walks.

We found a paved forest service road with a turn off (that was also paved) and parked up off the side of that rarely traveled road. It was a fantastic spot to be. Even on Memorial Day weekend, we saw few cars over the six days.

Campfires kept us very busy.

The parking spot was indicative of our time there. We were able to celebrate Scott’s birthday. He loved his big ticket gift of a Mavic Air drone. I think we are all still very impressed with how amazing the images are and how easy it is to fly.

Thank goodness we had a fire permit. The birthday brownie burned bright!

The first day out exploring the national parks, we drove the fifteen minutes to Grant Grove in King’s Canyon. The General Grant tree was enormous. It made the couple of sequoias we saw in Yosemite laughably small.

A sequoia chopped down over 100 years ago is still in good shape, only now it is a tunnel.

The weather wasn’t so great, so the kids knocked out their junior ranger badges and we spent the next couple of days hiking around our RV and having campfires. We did make the incredible drive down highway 180 so that we could fully appreciate the beauty of The Canyon.

King’s Canyon’s beauty lies in the valleys that glaciers have carved.

Sequoia was a little farther away at almost an hour drive.

It turned out to be well worth the trip. General Sherman (the largest living tree in the world) was one of many very cool sightings.

The pictures of the trees simply don’t show how large they are. This chart gives better size examples.

Caden and Scott weren’t feeling 100%, so they hung back while Keali and I took off to do a couple of mile hike through the Giant Forest. “Giant Forest” is an understatement.

Around every corner was a new and usually shockingly big tree or grove. I was happy we made the stop at the two national parks, and they were really beautiful in their own ways.

The Senate is a grove of trees that likely sprouted at the same time.

By far though, our best memories of these parks will be more focused on where we were camping and all the amazing things we saw there.

A bear track VERY near our camping spot.

A brightly colored red snow flower we spotted. It doesn’t have chlorophyll so can’t perform photosynthesis. Instead, it gets nutrients from fungi.

A triple trunk sequoia near our camping spot. It appeared to be bigger than both the General Sherman and General Grant trees.

We found some deep cracks while on a hike along some of the glacier carved granite. This was was deeper than Caden is tall.

The giant sequoias are fascinating. This tiny cone typically only releases its seeds (each the size of a oat) after a fire. The protective bark of the sequoia can be over a foot thick and protects the parent tree from burning.

The Amazing Yosemite National Park

After leaving Los Angeles, we bypassed King’s Canyon and Sequoia and went directly to Yosemite National Park. We had heard that the peak season would be something to avoid since it is one of the busiest parks, and it was to start in the next seven days. We were glad we made the decision to go early even though it meant backtracking to get to the other national parks in California.

The drive there was particularly interesting. To get to the west side of the park, you have to drive about eight miles of steep and incredibly curvy roads.

Scott handled it like a champ, but he was pretty worn out when we arrived.

We stayed at a fantastically cool RV park there (Yosemite Pines). We had a nice big open space, there was a nature walk, and we had a fire pit that we used every night.

Beautiful weather let us open all the windows and doors when we were at home.

Of course, if you ask Keali, she’ll tell you that the highlight was the petting zoo, complete with alpacas and goats and some hours old baby bunnies.

Petting zoo!!

At one point, she was taking the alpaca on a walk through the RV park. I’m still unsure how that happened

For the rest of us though, the highlights were in the park. Yosemite was stunning. I had expected some mountains and whatnot, but I was not expecting the pure size of the place. The granite domes and glacier-cut valleys were absolutely breathtaking. Every day we drove in, we were treated to the largest waterfall in North America. The place took me completely by surprise. I know now why it is one of the busier national parks!

We took some great hikes including one that took us on a several mile hike, part of which was alongside a waterfall. Featured as one of the ten most beautiful hikes in the country, the name of it was Mist Trail (Vernal Falls).

Whoever named it clearly did not hike it before naming it, or it would have been named something more appropriate, like Drenched Trail or perhaps Buckets-of-Water-Falling-On-Your-Head Trail. The kids loved it far more than my hamstrings. Still, it was extremely fun and challenging.

The last picture before we all got soaking wet in the “mist”.

That particular day, we were meant to go on another hike but after consulting one of the rangers, we decided to not go due to an incoming heavy thunderstorm. Later that same day, a young climber fell to his death climbing the Half Dome. I think people forget that nature is really just trying to kill us.

Yosemite treated us to our first giant sequoia trees. We had no idea that what we would later see at Sequoia National Park would dwarf the ones in Yosemite.

One of the smaller sequoias.

Another great memory of the visit to Yosemite was visiting the Miwok Native American museum. We were lucky that there was a member of the tribe there to share knowledge and information. We learned how to start fires, feed from pine cones, make arrowheads from the obsidian, and more. It was one of my favorite parts of the park.

Yosemite far outperformed my expectations. It’ll definitely be a contender for top five favorite parks.

North LA for a Long Week

Scott needed to get back to Houston for work, so we went back towards LA so as to be closer to the Burbank airport. We ended up staying at an RV park in Northridge. It will go down as our least favorite place to stay. It doesn’t even matter what we face in the future, it will be difficult to be as awful as the place we stayed in Northridge. We were backed up to an extremely busy road (seven lane major thoroughfare). The cars and trucks traveled up and down the road at breakneck speeds (and very loudly) all hours of the day and night. The RV park didn’t allow the dog to be walked inside the park, so we were forced to walk Gracie down the very busy street a couple of blocks to get to the nearest park for grass. It was awful.

We tried to stay busy in order to not focus on how bad where we were staying was.

After we took Scott to the airport, the kids and I went to the California Science Center. I was a little taken aback when I bought tickets at the window since it was “by donation”. Thrilled at the idea of everyone having an opportunity to visit the science museum, we donated what we would have paid at most of the other science centers. The place was absolutely packed. It was so packed with school field trips, we couldn’t move from one exhibit to another. So we went to the cafeteria and ate and waited on the school kids to go back to their schools. The plan worked great. Once it was a little quieter, we thoroughly enjoyed the science center.

Endeavor on display.

We were able to see one of the space shuttles, as well as having multiple exhibits on different ecosystems.

The astronauts’ toilet. We studied this for too long.

It’s a definite must for science and nature enthusiasts. It was pretty great learning more about the kelp forests that we had gone diving in the week before. We should’ve just done it in a different order.

Another day, the kids and I took our bikes and drove to the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Center. We stopped for the kids to get another junior ranger badge and then headed to the hills.

It was funny when we got lost, but not so funny when we finally figured out where we were and where we wanted to go, but were too tired to actually make it. I really wanted to see the MASH sitcom scenes, but we just couldn’t do it. The park was beautiful though.

At one point we found the western scene that Paramount Movies used for tons of their films.

All in all, LA has much more to offer than what most might think. I’d love to spend more time there, but I would never want to go back to the place we stayed. Either way, we were all pretty excited to head to Yosemite when Scott returned.

The Channel Islands National Park

We drove from San Diego through Los Angeles to Ventura. I was pleasantly surprised by how not-nearly-as-hard-of-a-drive going through LA was in the RV. Of course, Scott was driving, but even he thought it would be much more difficult than it was.

We stayed just outside of Ventura in a KOA RV park. Most of the admin portion of the park had burned in the California wildfires last year, so it was mostly empty which was great for us. The kids enjoyed riding around on their bikes, while Gracie enjoyed the walks in the woods. We were all disturbed by how devasting the fires had been.

Peacocks made the campground fun (and noisy).

Our first order of business was to go to the Channel Islands National Park. There is only one ferry that goes to most of the islands each day (and even then it doesn’t run every day), so we were happy to be able to get tickets to go on the one hour ride. The islands were stunning to see as we got closer. The abundance of sea lions and dolphins made for an even more fun arrival.

Sea lions were spotted the entire trip over.

There were fewer than 60 people that went to the Santa Cruz Island with us. It felt as if we had the entire place to ourselves.

Only one boat per day for going and returning. You don’t want to miss the return trip!

At the visitor center, we learned that the islands had originally been part of mainland California and had been spun out to see when the North American and Pacific plates moved against each other. Keali was excited to learn about the mammoths swimming out to the islands and eventually evolving into Pygmy mammoths.

Of course I was excited about the hike. The island was beautiful with its cliffs and crashing waves from the ocean. The place is what one might imagine the cliffs of Ireland looking like (only much warmer).

We spotted several fun wildlife critters on our hike. We not only saw a couple of island foxes (one of the rarest foxes in the world due to them only inhabiting the islands), but we also saw some fantastic bees that live in the ground. Digger bees (also known as Chimney Bees) were brand new to us, and the kids freaked a little each time we had to cross their nests. (We learned later that they are not aggressive at all.)

Digger bees live in the ground and don’t work as a hive but rather as individuals.

The next day, I flew back to return to Guymon for KC’s dad’s funeral. It was a very quick trip, and it was wonderful to see all of the family. Ken Rothschopf was a great man and left a fantastic legacy with his wife and children. Everyone lost a little with his death.

While I was gone, Scott took the kids to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. They enjoyed seeing Air Force One.

The future POTUS.

But I think they enjoyed picking strawberries right afterwards even better. I enjoyed eating the fruits of their labor when I returned to Ventura.

The strawberry farm had Pygmy goats. I’m surprised Keali left.

Our final event in Ventura was scuba diving one of the other Channel Islands, Atacama Island. We had never been diving in kelp forests nor super cold water. Our 7mm wet suits were surprisingly warm, but they were heavy and difficult to maneuver in outside of the water. The kelp forests were interesting to see and swim through. There was not an abundance of other life. We were able to spot some garibaldi and some kelp fish, and on one dive we saw some gigantic lobster huddled in a swimthrough. The Channel Islands waters are protected the same as the surface, so the lobsters grow to be shockingly big.

The kids decided to snorkel the cold waters once we were out on the boat.

All in all, Ventura was a fantastic stop. The city itself was clean and pretty and bustling but not crowded. We ate good when we ate out, and the Channel Islands were beautiful. By far the highlight was the trip home from the islands. A pod of hundreds of dolphins swam up to our boat, and then as if a signal was sent out, they all flitted across the surface of the water and hurriedly swam away. Seeing it might be one of the top highlights of the trip. This picture doesn’t even begin to tell the story of the dolphins spread out as far as you could see and on both sides of the boat. We’ll never forget it.