Family Trek

Yosemite National Park is amazing. Being from California I think that I didn’t give it enough respect. I heard about it all the time growing up. Being from Lake Tahoe I didn’t think it was that much different. I was wrong. Check out the Wikipedia excerpt: The park covers an area of 761,268 acres (3,080.74 km2)[2]and reaches across the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountain chain.[4] Over 3.7 million people visit Yosemite each year:[3]most spend their time in the seven square miles (18 km2) [...]

Have you ever let a bad start to a trip ruin the whole time? That almost happened, but we were redeemed. It started out rough. Stayed up until 1:30 am the night before our Yosemite camping trip working and then got a very late start to the day (3 hours late!). Road construction delays, rain-with my non-waterproof suitcase on the roof, and two kids who had already been in the car for an hour before we even got on the [...]

If you have been following this blog over the past few days you know there are a lot of emotions wrapped up in Yosemite.  I can assure you there were tears shed by both my wife and me as we wrote our posts earlier this week–especially as we re-visited losing our son Elijah William. I don’t want to give you the wrong idea though. This wasn’t a somber trip.  We were camping with friends.  We laughed.  We joked.  We had [...]

This week we are camping at Yosemite National Park with our good friends Lisa and Andy Nelson and their boy Caden. As much as we love to travel and adventure, it’s hard to believe that we’ve failed to really take in this world renowned area which is so close to where we’ve lived in Santa Barbara and Lake Tahoe. Maybe we’ve been hesitant to go back because it conjures up so many memories. Almost four years ago I quit my [...]

In the morning we’re leaving on a camping trip at Yosemite with friends. We love camping and we love traveling with friends. We’ve done both with our Yosemite traveling partners for this week. We’ve barely thought for a moment about the trip. Haven’t thought about what clothes we’ll pack. What will the temperatures be? What are we planning to do when we get there? What gear will we need? A few months ago Monica’s family was visiting us from Santa [...]

We were driving home after an incredible time camping at Klamath and Crater Lakes in Oregon and then at the Redwoods.  It was our first bionafied family camping trip and it’d been all we hoped for and more.  Long drive home and of course there came a point where one of us asked the question.  I can’t remember if it was me asking my wife or vice versa but it doesn’t really matter.  The answer we came to was the [...]