Muir Woods

We are back from an amazing trip to San Francisco! It was lovely, and my grandmother's birthday was such a wonderful huge family reunion. I'm waiting for all the pictures that other people took, because I? Had a tiny Jakey baby hanging on me grabbing at the camera. Which does not lead to good photographs. Or even ones that are in focus.

In any case. Have you ever been to Muir Woods? It's a National Monument established by Teddy Roosevelt (under the huge influence of John Muir), and is a huge sequoia grove. Sequoias are big. Really, really big. How big? Here we are inside one of them:



That whole thing is one tree!

Lara climbed inside a baby one that was felled by fire:



This tree was born in 909 AD and fell in 1930. Both Misha and my dad calculated its age as 2000 years. Um, aren't you guys supposed to be some kind of mathsters?



The park is open to visitors, but you have to stay on a boardwalk and aren't allowed to go near most of the trees. It reminded me of that Ray Bradbury story, "A Sound of Thunder" where the time travelers have to stay on a floating path so they don't disturb anything in the past.



We stayed on the path. The only thing that was disturbed was a baby who failed to take a nap.



Nice work, Linda! This is the best picture of us in existence!



And finally, this interaction has to be described at length:



Lara: I'm a wild bear that lives in a cave! This is my cave and I'm a bear. Rrrarrr!
Boy: (looks at her skeptically) You're just a pretend bear.
Lara: No, I'm a wild bear! We can both pretend! I live in this cave.
Boy: (more and more skeptical) You're not a bear. I live in a house.
Lara: (totally frustrated) No, you're a bug! Bears like to eat bugs! I'm going to eat you! Rrrarrr!
Boy: (with conviction) Kids aren't bugs.

We were dying, as you can imagine. My dad decided this is the prototypical "men are from Mars, women are from Venus" exchange.