And farther north we went!

Homboldt Redwoods State Park is about 3 hours south of Oregon. The drive up was lovely! In fact, it began raining while the sun was out and we drove underneath a rainbow.

It was fun to see the bigfoot tourist spots on the side of the road. In case you were wondering, yes, this is where bigfoot lives! No, we did not see him, but some of the hitchhikers could have fooled me.

We arrived on a Sunday afternoon, it was still packed with the weekend crowd. This campground (Burlington) had almost no privacy in their campsites. The site behind ours was so close to us with so little separation that the group staying there walked through our site all night. We took a walk around the campground after dinner and noticed some neighbors were even closer to each other than we were to ours.

Maybe because the sites were so close together, the fire pits were extremely tall/deep. Which made it difficult to keep warm without building a bigger fire (and burning through the wood faster). The state park itself was really beautiful, but Burlington campground was a bit weird.

We went exploring on the second day by taking a self-guided car tour of Avenue of The Giants. It is a road that runs parallel to the 101 with various stopping points for trails and old trees that have names.  We received a tour map at check in. The tour took us near Rockefeller Forest, which is the largest remaining contiguous old-growth coastal redwood forest in the world.  To finish the tour, we took a short walk into one of the longer trails. The redwoods were absolutely massive. The ground was covered in moss, clovers, and ferns.

Driving long hours and setting up camp can be pretty tiring, we discovered a little comfort food goes a long way. Bread and cheese tasted amazing. We had ravioli for dinner a few times. The kind you buy at the market already partially cooked. And I kid you not, Seth made the tomato sauce from scratch each time! He developed a recipe at home for pasta sauce and insisted on making it while camping.

In the morning, we packed up and left early, very eager to cross the Oregon border!!