Phaedra here (finally):

We left the fog and a high of 60 degrees a couple of days ago, and  headed east towards the Carson City/Reno area and 100 degrees.  Since we ended up with a bit more time in Carson City than we anticipated, I’m going to send this out to y’all now.  I have to tell you that Papa ended up having surgery to reattach a retina and repair two tears in it.  It’s a good thing that this happened on the third day there because they wouldn’t have seen anything except the inside of the RV otherwise.  Everything is improving, so he should be released from the docs and on the way out of here soon.

Anyway, back to the tale of the big trees... After leaving Eugene, we all went to the land of real fog.  It took us six days along the Northern California coast before we saw blue sky over the ocean.  All of this time was spent in the land of the giant redwoods.  We camped at a small campground in Klamath right on the Klamath River.  (Guess what?  The river has a tide!)  We were about 35 miles south of the Oregon border on the Pacific and in the middle of 3 different redwood forests.  Mama and Papa took us to them all.

They did drive to Crescent City the first day without us, and we had a great time barking at our neighbors while they were gone.  So good were we at barking, the owner left a note on the camper saying we could not be left alone.  That really worked out well for us!

They took us on a picnic south about 30 miles away through the Elk Prairie Redwood Park which was at one time the original part of route 101 along the entire west coast.  It was a beautiful 10 mile trip with stops to look at huge trees.  We had a nice picnic and then watched two different herds of Roosevelt Elks.  One of the herds was grazing on the beach right near the Pacific!  How strange to see that when all we have seen is elk in forest areas.  We missed a lot of turnouts on the trip so we got to go back there another day, too.

We all went back up to the southern Oregon coast at Brookings.  We had a fun day except there was lots of fog.  There were two lighthouses that we really enjoyed.  You could walk to one of them and one is 16 miles off the coast.  It was constructed in 1848 when the steamer, Brother Johnson went down and is now a monument as well as a working lighthouse.  We did  drive on some birding trails - one to the mouth of the Smith River where were able to watch many more than 100 harbor seals basking in the sun and playing in the shallow waters. I don’t know why we couldn’t swim with the seals, but I guess the water’s really, really cold!  I wonder if seals would think we were food, too.  Maybe that’s why we weren’t allowed in the ocean.  There were tons of cormorants, seagulls, and Brown Pelicans, too.  We thought maybe we were back on Sanibel at first!

Mama got Papa to drive on a 10 mile, dirt, two-way road (which was actually a one lane road with turnouts) in Jedediah Smith Redwood Park.  That road wasn’t too bad for Zoe and me.  We just closed our eyes and curled up on our bed!  Mama didn’t like it too much, though.  Papa’s a really good driver - she’s just a control freak, if you know what I mean.  For instance, she won’t let me sample all sorts of goodies left on the ground by elk or others.  Isn’t that what the treats are there for?  Go figure!  The Redwood Trees are soooooo tall.  They are straight and I got a stiff neck trying to look up.  The ride took over an hour to go 10 miles and we, finally, had a great picnic when we got to the end of the road.

The next day, we hopped right back into the truck and went on another dirt road - only a smaller one this time.  It was a 4 mile road and then we had to turn around and come back the way we went.  Dad survived that one and had had enough of small dirt roads with the dually.  Pictures don’t begin to show  how fantastic the redwoods really are.  You’ve just got to see them to believe them!

All of us hated to leave the Pacific Coast, but we were looking forward to warmer weather and the folks hoped to wear shorts again which they hadn’t done since Kansas!  Remember, be careful what you wish for...  Ninety-nine degrees is kinda hot!

Here’s licks and wags to all of you from your “fur-friends” -

Phaedra and Zoe