First and foremost, I want to publicly wish both Zak and my dad a happy Father’s Day! They are both fun, supportive, and rock stars in the eyes of Zoe and Ellie. The three of us could not be luckier. Seriously. (And they both make great cocktails!)
We started the hour-long drive to Sequoia and soon noticed a scraping sound coming from the bottom of the car. I pulled off the road into the lot of a farm stand. Sure enough, the scraping sound was coming from a loose piece of the car. This particular piece has been giving us trouble for years and is the particular piece that is held up with zip ties. This particular piece was guaranteed to be fine by the car guy on Ogden that we gave $700. I think this piece is the front end bumper or something. Oye! So Zak pulled out the baggie of extra zip ties and the fancy multitask tool and set to work. Without uttering a bad word he fixed it the best it can be fixed while the girls and I picked some fresh fruit for our hike. Zak latter mentioned that he might need to just take that piece off if it keeps scraping on the road.
We made our way back into the mountains. It’s been a long time since we’ve looked at a map and have seen elevations in the 14,000s. Before we knew it we surrounded by the giant sequoias. Wow. I’ve never seen anything like them. Just towering toward the sky.
It wasn’t a hard or long hike, but we still had so much fun. We all laughed so hard. My ab muscles hurt more from laughing than my legs do from hiking. Ellie mentioned in her post that I freaked out (understatement) when I saw what I thought was a bear. We were in an area that I would describe as “potentially beary” and when I heard a creature charging in our direction. I scream “Bear!!” and started thinking of all the bear deterers I knew. I was ready to throw small pebbles in the direction when I looked right into the eyes of a deer who was out for a morning jog. It scampered past us, just a few feet away from where the girls were posing for a picture. Everyone made fun of me.
I’ll get even by saying that Zak completely wigged out when he saw what he thought was a squirrel fall from the top of a sequoia. It was a twig.
We just laughed the whole day. That was the real reason the bears stayed away from us, we were too giggly.
After a hellish drive back to the hotel on the world’s curviest road, we got to talk to my dad, went swimming, and ordered Baja Fresh for a simple Father’s Day dinner.
