The road is making us rugged.
It was part of a flap on the tent blowing in the breeze, and yes I was sure but I still climbed out of our warm sleeping bag and headed out into the wild to clip the little plastic hook on the elastic string back into the loop where it belonged. I looked around while disposing some of the beer I drank earlier into the woods. The salmon bucket was tipped over but there was no sign of any bear activity anywhere.
(the cleaning station the next morning)
I went back to sleep and got up just before 8am. I left everyone else sleeping and opened all the doors on the van and cleaned it all out. I just about took out everything, organized it and put it back in. We had a pretty big mess of stuff strewn about that I put away. Heath and the kids got up during this and helped me unpack our campsite and pack up the van.
I think we were on the road by 9:30. Across the street was a tree we could drive through so we did that then continued on north.
There were several ocean overlook points we wanted to hit on the way out and look for whales and seals and stuff but the Nothing had taken them over
so instead we got Peanut’s Jr Ranger badge
then went into Jed Smith State Park to look at more of the Redwoods.
We parked at a trailhead and wondered over.
We just happened to hit the start of a Ranger hike with a big group and decided to join in. The ranger did a great job telling us all sorts of cool stuff about the trees and really impressed us with how unique and awesome the redwood forest was.
(this is a picture I took super zoomed up in to the tree, you can see a second large tree has started to grow out of the side of the big redwood)
(those round things at the base of the redwood tree are callled burls, the redwoods grow from seeds but it is much more comon for new redwoods to form out of the burls on a big tree, you can see a medium sized tree and a few small ones have all grown from the burls on this big tree, It’s possible this big tree grew from the burls on an older tree that has since fallen down and thats why no one really knows how old these trees really are, some of the trunks still standing are 1500 or so years but they could just be from burls of older trees)
Peanut was super involved and interested in the program and tried to help out the Ranger.
We stayed a little longer than planned but it was just too cool to leave. Once the ranger was done we rushed back to the car and hopped back on the highway out.
Peanut got out the Nintendo, Pumpkin ate a banana and then closed her eyes, I started writing blogs about the last few days and Heath giggled at this American Life, cursed the slow drivers taking their time with the windy curves and drove us on to Portland.
Traffic stunk getting out of the park and getting into Portland but the middle part was really nice. We got to our hotel after 6 and unpacked a bit and met up with Pops, Annie and Karl. Heath took a shower we found a restaurant and went out to eat. We tried to go to a place called Salvador Molly’s since Man vs Food went there but it was not where the GPS said it was so we ate at a place called Hobnob instead that was really there. The menu was impressive and it had lots of really good sounding burgers. The wait for them was pretty long and when they got there we tore into them. Surprisingly Heath got the “Heart Attack” deep fried burger
and I got the the farmland with runny eggs and lots of ham.
We shared some of them and they were both really good. After dinner we loaded some stuff and the kids into Pop’s car and sent them off to Seattle.
Heath and I were on our own. We headed down town parked and walked arround. We found Vodoo Donuts (also from Man vs Food) and ordered a few donuts though we were uncomfortably stuffed from our dinner. 
(a maple bacon, a Portland Creme and an Old Dirty Bastard covered in oreos and peanut butter)
After dropping the donuts at the car we walked around a bit more and tried to find a bar that would not card me but we got stopped at the door each time and my missing wallet story did not convince anyone.
So we went back to the hotel and had some wine and relaxed watching Seinfield awhile before going to bed for a long night of sleep.