Zachary's First Camping Trip

As I mentioned in the previous post, we went on our first family camping trip last weekend. We stayed in a cabin at Hendy Woods State Park, which "features two virgin redwood groves; Big Hendy with a self-guided discovery trail and Little Hendy. The Navarro River runs the length of the park.

"Located in the middle of the Anderson Valley wine district, this park is warmer and less foggy than redwood parks along the coast. The park is well known for a fallen redwood stump that was home for a man known locally as the Hendy Woods Hermit."

The only downside is that it was 3.5 hr drive from SF. (The State Parks website and Google say less than 3, but that's in a world without Bay Area weekend warrior traffic.) We have plenty of camping options a lot closer to home, and next time we'll take advantage of one of them. This was a bit of special situation b/c the reservation for the cabin more or less fell into our laps.

Zachary did great for about the first 2.5 hours of the drive in both directions, but the last hour was really tough. He got cranky, tired and hungry, and Amy ended up feeding him while he was in the car seat. That was really the toughest part of the whole weekend. That and getting the temperature in the cabin right. The wood stove worked great, too great. But it only held two medium sized logs, and by 2 or 3 in the morning it got chilly. Brrrrr ...

Our own, semi-private, cabin in the woods



Zach is getting real good at reaching out and grabbing ... everything.
The name of the cabin is "Ringtail", the one next door was "Puma".
Campsites and cabins at state and national parks have to have clever,
nature-themed names, it's the law.



The cabin had a table and full-size bunk buds. We slept on an
airmatress on the bottom and let Zach have the top bunk ...
JUST KIDDING!!!



... no, no, there's the Pack n Play that Zach slept in. And we only
moved it near the wood burning stove in the morning, to help
dry out his blanket. Which was wet, and not for the reason you might think ...



... but because daddy got a little complacent. Remember how I
said earlier that Zach has gotten really good at reaching
out and grabbing? Well, once he's got a grip, he pulls.
In this case, it was my cereal bowl, full to the brim with
cereal and milk, which spilled all over the floor (see highligted
area in the photo). Thankfully, nobody cried. Except maybe Amy,
who graciously volunteered to clean the mess up.



Zach was very interested in the trees.



Here's the stump of one of them.



We took a short walk down to the Navarro river.



Family portrait!



We stopped at an organic apple orchard on the
way back. It was just about a mile from the park,
and we needed a place to stop and feed Zachary.
We also needed a little refreshment ourselves, and
their self-serve farm stand, complete with cold,
fresh apple juice was just begging us to stop.



The apples and pears they had for sale. So colorful, so yummy!



They had this amazing garden out back, shaded by
a stand of trees they had landscaped (arborscaped?)
into an archway/collonade/gazebo. Very cool.
... and there's Zach, reaching for his bottle. I guess
if you put enough things in your mouth, eventually
you hit paydirt!