It's not a vacation it's a trip!!

I think that when you come back from a vacation you're rested and relaxed. When you come back from a trip you are exhausted. We started our trip off with a bang, a midnight hike up to the top of Mt. Lassen. You start at 8500 elevation and end at 10453. We went with the young men and women. Erick packed Abbie on his back and I packed Emma on my back (they pretty much just slept the whole way) and Tyler hiked it. It was a pretty hard hike, but at midnight we made it to the top. At 10000 feet we were just barely above the smoke. Thank goodness for Will B. who so cheerfully packed Emma down the mountain for me (my back hurt so bad). Tyler was really a trooper he did great!! I think we rolled back into town at 3:00 am. (Maybe not the best way top start a 6 day camping trip, but it was an adventure.

That's the full moon in the back ground. I don't what it looks like in the day but at night it looked like we were on the moon, barren and desolate.

The next day we made our way to the coast and stayed at some campgrounds in the redwoods. It was very pretty. We stayed there for 6 nights and while we were there we did some biking, hiking, hanging out on the beach.

We found this troll in the window of an old bridge shed. Just moments before Erick told kids we were going to bike over the troll bridge, we thought it was pretty cool when we looked over and saw this.

We also passed a few of these on one of our bike rides. I'm just glad that we didn't see any bears.

The perfect camping spot

Double decker s'more, (maybe that's why I gained 5 pounds on this trip!!!)

Abbie was on her bike every second that she could.

Skipping rocks in the river.

We found some wonderful bike rides to go on. Erick was worried that his hard core biking image might be ruined by the having the baby seat on back.

On the longer bike rides we went on Abbie used the Alleycat. On the hills I made sure that she helped me pedal. Tyler was on his own bike, and once again he was quite a trouper. He didn't think that it was fair that we could use our gears on the hills (his bike doesn't have gears) and so Erick stayed in 3rd gear the whole time to make it fair.

The trails were absolutely beautiful.

We were having an ordinary dinner, when I looked over at Emma and she had made a taco mask. She is always cracking us up.

It was so great just to hang out with each other. We had a wonderful time, and came home exhausted.