Sequoias and the Sea

We have officially completed the first ever Reynolds' Family Vacation and were truly blessed! Although we love visiting our extended family and miss them dearly we felt it was time to put our vacation days purely toward some immediate family bonding time camping first, at the beach, and then on to Sequoia. It was quite the epic adventure for me.

We packed our little truck to the brim and headed first to McGrath State Beach for the weekend. Look at the link and notice the picture in the header, it looks nothing like that. No grass and really poofy dirt that was constantly thrown into the air from the throng of toddlers and preschoolers our crew travels with (only 9 kids 5 and under this time) but none the less it was good. Here we are in front of our super awesome new tent. This is the cleanest our kids were for a week... So the reason I am a little bitter with McGrath was not the dirt, but while the men were setting up our site us womenfolk planned to take the kids over the sand dune to see the beach. Little did we know that there was a lagoon just after the dune and you had to walk about a mile and a half through sand around the lagoon to get to the beach. That wasn't happening with coolers, chairs and sand toys, not to mention the 9 kids so we drove to Ventura Harbor and had a great time! It was a great beach for kids, I think we ended up with a few extra because they were just sprouting out of the sand everywhere we looked.
The baby girls went for a quick jog to help maintain their girlish figures...
I have to say I was intimidated with the challenges of packing for beach camping as well as mountain camping. I hadn't even begun to fill out our winter wardrobes and there was a bit of last minute scrambling but here we are dressed and warm in Sequoia National Park. We took down our tent and left the beach Sunday morning and set up our tent in the mountains that night.The nights were a bit chilly with the low around 30 degrees but we were warm in our abundant layers of PJs. Libby was like the boy in A Christmas Story that was so bundled up he couldn't move, she was not too thrilled.Our family devotion time consists of reading a section from the Bible, singing a few songs and then reading a chapter of a book. We are currently reading my dad's favorite children's book, My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George, which is such a wonderful book for little boys. In the story a little boy runs away from the city to live in the wilderness and makes his home in a burned out tree. The boys saw this tree and immediately thought a boy was probably living in this tree. We hiked and saw General Sherman, a giant sequoia which happens to be the largest living organism on Earth. Libby had the best seat in the house! There were lots of big rocks that begged little boys to climb upon them.Although our site was rather secluded, the few neighbors we had were quite friendly. Can you find Libby in this picture? On this particular night I took Dan with me to wash dishes and within 5 minutes of our return to camp a mother bear and her cub walked right down the path Dan and I had just come down. The boys were a little nervous to see the bears and decided that if one did come to our camp, Erik would fight it with his hands. You have to appreciate the confidence they have in him!Here is Mountain Libby, just too cute!Hey Libby! You have a little something just there...
Libby's idea of hiking consists of walking 5 feet and then examining every speck of dirt individually. You must always have a doll in tow!


Jake, of course, was all about the dirt.
Dan was ready and willing to start a fire anywhere, at any moment (that's a lighter in his hands). Thankfully he wasn't responsible for the fire that raging in the park while we were there. I had a last minute thought to take a picture of the smoke as we were leaving, unfortunately this is the best I could do as the thought only struck when we were halfway down the mountain and the good views were obscured by trees. By our third day the air quality was getting poor and we decided to call it quits as I was already sick and Jacob coughing.It was a wonderful time and I hope Jake, at least, is old enough to remember some of the trip. I hope they will have fond memories of enjoying God's creation and the family He has blessed us with. I hope they really understand that God made that big, blue ocean they swam in and that God made those towering trees that were so tall they couldn't see the tops. I pray they really know that we pray with them, read Scripture with them and talk about God to them because we really believe it is true.