Parks and Recreation

Dear diary, we’re now well underway on the trip and starting to get into the groove of living in our caravan. By that I mean it’s 10pm and I’ve just finished the dishes and both kids are still awake. Here’s some stuff that’s happened in the last week and a bit:

Tall timber

• We hit up our first national park of the trip – Redwood in Northern California. Redwood is a slightly funny park, with no entrance fee or clear borders, and runs into two or three other redwood-themed state parks. As a Kiwi it’s not quite as spectacular or different as most other parks: the scenery feels quite familiar, like taking a bushwalk somewhere cool and drizzly back home. The trees themselves are still pretty choice, and a little bigger and older than their cuzzies in Rotorua.

• All the national parks run a version of the Junior Ranger programme, which is both of way of giving kids something to do and teaching them some good conservation principles. Kids of 4 and up can complete a series of activities, and receive a badge once they’ve made their Junior Ranger pledge. Mo loves this system, and has been proudly wearing her Redwood and Yosemite badges (we didn’t get back to the visitor centre in time in Sequoia and Kings Canyon – sorry Mo!), as well as collecting stamps in her National Park passport.

• The chilly weather from the Pacific Northwest continued at Redwood, but then turned into a sweltering 30 degrees as we drove back up into Oregon and then back down over the lower Cascades to Mt Shasta, CA, and onwards through the fruit belt to Grass Valley.

• We hit 34 degrees further south in Visalia, CA, the closest campsite for Kings Canyon (their lack of apostrophes, not mine) and Sequoia National Parks. Can’t imagine what it’s like here in the height of summer: the campground has a pool but it isn’t even open yet as it’s still their winter season until 1st of May! The differences in temperature between relatively close areas are fascinating: while we’re baking in Visalia, an hour east there’s a lot of snow still on the ground in Sequoia and Kings Canyon, and half of the park roads are still close due to snow and ice.

Paparazz-mo

• Mo has inherited my old digital camera, and is enjoying taking photos of everything (literally, everything). Her best shoot so far has been some squirrels at the Mt Shasta KoA.

• Mt Shasta isn’t normally on the California highlight reels but it probably should be – the state’s largest peak is shapely and blimmin’ huge, and still with a lot of snow on top given the hot weather at ground level.

• We tried to stop at the Sierra Nevada brewery in Chico on the way from Mt Shasta to Grass Valley, but were foiled by a carpark that wasn’t designed for trucks towing large trailers. Not sure if this counts as a stop on my beer pilgrimage – I could see the fermenters full of their famous Pale Ale, I just couldn’t get out of the car.

Open plan workplace

• Grass Valley is rich in gold mining history – we visited the Empire Mine state park, which preserves a mine that operated from the mid-1800s until the mid-1900s. As well as loads of old machinery, you can go about 50ft underground in one of the shafts and see a further 100ft down – at its deepest the mine is 11,000ft. I’m glad I’m good enough with spreadsheets and writing beer labels that I don’t have to be a gold miner for a living.

• On paper our day in Grass Valley didn’t look like a major highlight of the trip, but we really needed a ‘day off’ with minimal driving to wander around the cute little town (featuring not one but two record stores), teach the local café that a steamed milk for kids is actually called a fluffy, buy groceries, and do some thrift store toy shopping. Similarly, we had a great day off in Visalia to recharge the batteries. We’ve jammed so much into our itinerary that a few low-activity days will be very necessary.

• The last half of the drive from Grass Valley to our RV park near Yosemite was one of the most stressful of my driving career: towing a trailer around hairpin bends up a mountain pass while one child screams and the other sings operatically to try and drown it out. To add to the fun, when we finally arrived our campground had lost our reservation and only had a very small and pokey back-in site left, which took about half an hour of not-very-relaxing manoeuvring to get into.

El Capitan, Half Dome and Bridal Veil Falls

• We had two great days in Yosemite National Park. Yosemite is almost absurdly scenic, with a different angle of an amazing waterfall or mountain wherever you turn. You do get a bit blasé about the photography: oh, that waterfall isn’t quite as stunning as the last one, I’ll pass thanks. Yosemite is also bloody busy, even before of the high season – the majesty of the views is tempered slightly by the zillions of people taking stupid selfies at every turn.

World's largest tree larger than 4 year old's wingspan

• We’ve just got back from a busy day at Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. The main attraction is the trees: Sequoia boasts the world’s largest, the General Sherman, and Kings Canyon has the runner-up, General Grant. It was a really cool time to be in the parks, right on the cusp of the seasons: shorts and t-shirts for hiking, but still loads of snow on the ground. The road between the two parks was recently ploughed, with drifts as tall as the car on either side.

• Google Maps is both a technological marvel and a bit of a pain when you’re driving an RV. Some of the roads it’s given us have been barely better than goat tracks, which has caused a few hairy moments. You can ask it to select routes with no tolls; a good new bit of functionality might be ‘I’m towing a bloody massive trailer – no pokey farm lanes with massive potholes please’.

• We’ve started our new exercise regime: Carrying Kids Around National Parks (CKANP). Bo had been following the lower resistance, longer duration version: Kitty in the baby carrier. I’ve been going for the high resistance, lower duration one: carrying the backpack for the first half of the hike until Mo gets tired, and then Mo in the bigger-kid carrier on my back plus the backpack on the front for the second half. It’s like crossfit, in that it makes me both cross and fit. I think this could be the next big thing in fitness fads: whenever you kids get sick of jumping in and out of tyres or whatever it is you do at F-45, I’ll take your money for some CKANP training (catchier title TBC).

• I bloody love going to supermarkets in other countries. Two quite different experiences in the last few days: the grocery section in a Walmart in a fairly low rent part of California was utterly depressing, with a minsicule fruit and vege section, but every possible frozen or packet meal known to man; and then a fantastic Hispanic supermarket chain called Vallarta in Visalia with beautifully presented produce, freshly made tortillas, and every possible type of ceviche and seasoned pork and chicken.

• Bo had a birthday last week, and got to celebrate with coffee and donuts for breakfast, cult California chain In-N-Out Burger for lunch, and a surprise cake for dinner (plus a four hour drive in between).

Here comes trouble

• Kitty would prefer to spend the whole trip pulling herself up on things and holding-hands-walking. I’ve done about 50 lengths of walking inside the trailer this evening. I’m definitely going to lose the free-walking sweep – Bo has Utah which gives her a month earlier than my pick.

• Kitty has also decided that she no longer likes bananas or carrots, previously two key pillars of her diet. The caravan catering department is in a state of mild panic.

• Mo is continuing to enjoy making friends with kids at our campgrounds. Our neighbours in Visalia were a Russian family, and although the kids don’t have a common language, they’ve still managed to spend hours drawing, building blocks, and running round playing tag.

BEERWATCH: Bronze equal to Tioga Sequoia ‘Half Dome’ wheat and Mammoth ‘Yosemite’ pale ale, two local beers that tasted bloody good at the pizza parlour in Yosemite after a tiring hike. Silver goes to dirty old Budweiser Chelada in an unnecessarily large can – there aren’t many things that wouldn’t be better with some clamato juice and chilli. Taking gold in this edition is Sierra Nevada ‘Tropical Torpedo’ – we didn’t make it inside the brewery, but we got a mixed dozen at the supermarket, and this was the pick of the bunch.

MO’S PLAYGROUND REVIEWS: Mo is excited at the high prevalence of tetherball sets in California campgrounds, and also highly recommends the Crescent City KOA playground and the decommissioned ski-lift chair outside the office. We found a cracking playground in Visalia, but the heat meant the curly slide was bum-burningly hot even by mid-morning.

TUNEWATCH: Our current most played song is dictated by the Bluetooth function on the stereo in the truck, which plays the songs on my phone in alphabetical order by song every time you switch it on. So we’ve heard a lot of the mariachi riff of “Across the Wire” by Calexico – lucky it’s a good song (and a topical one in light of the silliness at the US border). Otherwise, DJ Momo is very much in charge, so currently stuck in my head is the song at the end of the audio book of “The Gruffalo” (and the following instrumental version so Mo can practice the words), and all of ludicrously catchy kids’ album by Lisa Loeb (yep, that one).