Day 4 - July 29, 2011
(California Redwoods! I had always wanted to see them but never knew much about the area. The Redwoods actually encompass the entire Northern California coast, and the National Park is actually a conglomeration of several smaller state and privately owned parks.)
(Trees of Mystery in Klamath, California. The Giant Paul Bunyan and Babe make the place look like a cheesy roadside attraction, but it was actually a pretty neat place. Of course, I happen to love cheesy roadside attractions anyway. Mr. V and I are in this picture, but these things were enormous and I think we're hard to see.)
(Elephant Tree inside the Trees of Mystery Trail)
(Part of the Trees of Mystery Trail)
(There's a gondola at the Trees of Mystery that takes you up to this overlook, where you're actually above all the giant Redwood trees.)
(In the gift shop at the Trees of Mystery. Another picture to add to our Pacific Northwest Bigfoot picture collection. Apparently, he lives and roams in a pretty large area, since Washington, Oregon and Northern California all claim to be his home.)
(One of three trees like this, all of which are spaced over the course of a few hundred miles [just to give you an idea of how big the Redwood area is]. This one is literally in someone's backyard, and is the first one you come across as you drive south. Cheesy? Maybe - but how often do you get to drive through a giant tree? :-) [And don't mind the mess in my car. I don't usually look like a homeless person when I'm driving, but thats what happens when we incorporate a vacation into a move. The car got progressively worse every day just from unpacking and repacking every single day. I guess we technically were living out of our cars for 3 weeks, and that wasn't fun.])
(Me, and a giant Redwood tree. These trees were really tall, but I have to admit that they weren't as wide as I had expected. I have a picture of me like this by a tree in the Olympic National Park thats twice the width of this one.)Day 5 - July 30, 2011
(San Fransisco - by Alcatraz)
(Fisherman's Wharf - San Fransisco)
(I'm really not happy with how most of my San Fransisco pictures came out...here's a blurry one of me by the Full House house! [Otherwise known as Postcard Row and the Painted Ladies])
(Lombard Street - this picture does absolutely nothing to show the steepness of the street. It looks steep in this picture, but it looks twice as steep in real life.)
(Another attempt to show the steepness of Lombard Street - but again, this does nothing to show what it looks like in person.)
(driving down Lombard Street - the curviest street in the world)
(Mr. V and me after riding the San Fransisco Cable Car)
(I love this sign - now that we aren't in the hotel anymore. We didn't notice this until the second night at our hotel, but this wasn't exactly comforting to see.)Day 6 - July 31, 2011
(The Golden Gate Bridge - our last stop before leaving San Fransisco)
(The Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California. If you've never heard of it, basically Sarah Winchester was the daughter in law of the guy who invented the Winchester gun. She believed she was going to be haunted by the ghosts of everyone who had been killed with a Winchester rifle, unless she never stopped building this house. So she hired people to build and made changes to the house every single day, 24 hours a day, until the day she died. So basically, she was crazy. This house is crazy, but its a fun place to tour!)
(The "Door to Nowhere" - one of the many weird things that Sarah Winchester added to this house. It opens from the inside and clearly leads to nowhere, except the ground, 2 stories below once opened. Its about as weird as the staircase that goes up into the wall in another section of the house.)
(Sarah Winchester was also obsessed with the number 13, and spiders, so she has several places in the house where she has 13 spider designs, like these windows - there's 13 of them in this room.)
(in front of the Winchester House)Still more to come!
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