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California Road Trip

In the summer of 2018 I took my daughter on a 9-day road trip through California. Here is our little story.

Day 1

My phone alarm woke me up at 4am. I got up 7 minutes later and made coffee with our French press. I put half of it in a little thermos bottle. There were still a few things to load in the car (most of the luggage was loaded the previous day). After this I went back upstairs to get my daughter. My wife picked her up and put her in the backseat of the car where she was able to continue to sleep.

I wanted to leave early to beat the LA traffic. The plan was to have breakfast at the Black Bear Diner behind the mountain pass near Grapevine. We were finally leaving at 4:45am. Of course, after Anaheim, traffic slowed. Katie was still snoozing. In the Valley speed picked up again and the trip through the mountains went fast. We arrived at the Diner at 7:45am. Katie had a fruit bowl and was a little upset that there was only one grape among dozens of pieces of cantaloupe. As for my choice, I'm not sure whether I like it that now restaurants post the amount of calories for each dish. I think it helps though, because for an average healthy daily calorie intake of 2000, 1500 seems to be somewhat on the high side for breakfast, considering lunch and dinner are still in the future for that day. So I ordered a lighter omelette that was under one thousand calories. While waiting, I looked for hotels near Sequoia National Park on Hotel Tonight and chose one in Visalia.

In Google Maps I scrolled to Sequoia National Park looking for General Sherman, the largest (in volume) tree in the world. I wanted Katie to see these enormous trees because a couple of weeks ago when we were in Idyllwild, she asked if that big pine tree she saw was a Sequoia. "Not even close", I said, "Let's go see them on our trip". So here we are. "ETA 3 hours", it said. Wow, that seemed further than I expected. When we entered the park a sign said that due to road work in the park delays can be one hour. Shoot. Oh well, we'll just deal with it. It turned out only one lane was open and cars were directed intermittently in one direction each time.

This whole time Katie was asleep. When we arrived at the General Sherman Parking Lot, I woke her up. I put my face close to hers and called her name. She opened her eyes, smiled and pushed my face away. First we had some lunch. Just plain rolls with either nothing on them (for her) and cookies for me (hey, my breakfast was under 1000 calories). I had forgotten the cheese and butter in the fridge at home.

The hike was only 0.4 miles, but with a large altitude difference, so the way back could be rough, especially at 87 degrees. Katie looked around and said the trees look quite normal to her. I explained that these are regular pine trees but the Sequoias are near. I had seen them along the road coming into the park. We started walking and there was her first Sequoia. She stopped, her mouth dropped and she exclaimed, "Wow, they are big".

She took some pictures and videos. We continued on our way to General Sherman. "I wonder if it's a Mr. or Miss Sherman", she said. In the distance we saw it. A big tree indeed. When we arrived at the fence around the tree a ranger was giving a little talk. "You could fill an x amount of pools with the volume of General Sherman", she said. (I don't remember the value of x). "I see that there are not many swimmers among you",she stated while looking at the audience. "There are 20,000 pints of beer in General Sherman". "Ohh" went several men.

The way back to the car was indeed a little rough, but not too bad. We had brought enough water in my backpack. Next stop was King's Canyon. We went towards Hume Lake, where we shared an ice cream together. There was no cellular service on my phone so I was not sure how long it would take to get to our hotel, but it was probably something like 2 hours at least. It was already 4:30pm. While continuing on that road we passed a sign that said "Princess Camp Ground" and thought I was just going to try it and hope for somebody's reservation cancellation. Too bad about the nonrefundable Visalia hotel reservation.

A couple of days before I had checked tons of campgrounds and all were fully booked. Marie told me: "Who knew that in the high summer season all campgrounds would be booked?" We drove onto the grounds and found the camp host. He said that we could drive around and look for spots that may have a "Free" sign on them. I was not convinced to find one but yes!, there was one! We had brought our tent and other camping gear, too. The plan for the trip was to do a mix of hotels and campgrounds. Very excited, we set up our tent. After that we went back to Hume Lake to get cash to pay for the camp ground, hot dogs and buns, s'mores ingredients, wood logs and water.

The fire got started easily and Katie put the hot dogs on sticks. We ate them and after we finished the s'mores, we sat down in our little fold-up seats and read our books. At around 7 pm we went inside the tent and continued reading there. I picked up my iPad and started writing down our adventures for that day when Katie asked "Daddy, will you also write down that you wrote down what we did today?"