Laure and Quarup

Over Memorial Day weekend, we visited Northern California's Redwood National and State Parks, home of the tallest trees in the world!

Route to the redwoods.

We have arrived!

This network of parks contains a number of impressive old-growth Coastal Redwood groves, many documented to be up to 2,000 years old. These can be enjoyed while driving through the park but the best experience requires hiking amongst the trees.

Coastal Redwoods, the tallest trees in the world!

Laure hugging a big friend in Stout Grove.

At night, we camped at one of the parks' many campgrounds and did two of our favorite things: built a campfire and cooked on it!

Laure summoning fire.

Porterhouse cooked to perfection!

Although the old growth trees get all the fame, a must-do hike is the Fern Canyon - where its walls are beautifully covered by various species of ferns. Water streams down the canyon walls to join a creek that runs down the canyon to the nearby beach.

Fern canyon.

A breath taking easy hike.

Different fern species compete for water.

On another trail to view a waterfall, we crossed through a prairie where we spotted many Roosevelt elk grazing.

These elk look friendly.

We were amazed to see elk at such a short distance, yet we were slightly annoyed that they were on our trail (didn't they see the trail sign!?). The right thing for us to have done would have been to turn around and head back without disturbing the elk during what we later discovered was their mating season. Instead we did the wrong thing, which was to make noises and wait until they moved out of our way.

Get off the trail, stupid elk!

This worked for a while until we encountered a particular elk that did not want to cooperate. At first, he moved up a nearby hill as if he acknowledged us. As we started walking down the trail, he began urinating, which seemed a bit odd. After another moment, the elk charged us! We screamed like hell while bringing up our hiking poles and got out of there pretty damn fast.

OMG, run!

On the way back we avoided all elk by leaving the trail and cutting through thick bushes with another couple of hikers that were also charged by elk.

Up the bushes we go.

No stupid elks here!

After the scary encounter, we became more conservative about approaching wild animals. We used the car a lot more.

Try to charge us now, angry elk!

Mandatory car-in-tree photo.

The park highlighted several scenic drives. We enjoyed breathtaking views of the California coast. This will never get old.

California coast. Where we can safely view grey whales.

On our way home we took the old 101 highway and drove down the Avenue of the Giants. It's a 31 mile long scenic drive through a well preserved Redwood forest. The road offers a few spots where you can get up close and personal with nature.

Even fallen trees dwarfed us.

Every 18 years the northwestern United States gets an amazing daytime sky show. The moon passes between the earth and sun creating a unique solar eclipse. Since the moon is further from the earth, it's not large enough to create a total eclipse. With perfect alinement, the moon passes in front of the sun leaving just a sliver of sun shining all the way around the moon creating a Ring of Fire. The next time we'll be able to locally see this event is in 2023.

Trajectory where ring of fire was visible

We drove four hours north to Redding, California's Sundial Bridge for one of the best views of the Ring of Fire. The perfect alignment of the moon and sun only lasted four minutes but we thought it was worth the long drive.

Ring of fire diagram

We can't directly look at the sun because the sun's rays would burn our retinas. To look directly at the sun we had to wear special solar glasses or welding glasses to protect our eyes. These lenses are so dark that everything looks black unless you're staring at the sun. We were extremely lucky and bought two of the last few solar glass in northern California after waiting over an hour in line.

Protective sunglasses

Laure and the sundial bridge

A view of the solar eclipse through our new glasses.

Another way to view the solar eclipse is by watching the sun's shadow through a small pinhole. Several people at the park had homemade pinhole eclipse watcher set up to share with others. We are able to create a pinhole with our hands and watch the shadow change as the moon passed between the earth and sun.

Homemade eclipse shadow watcher

The shadow of the Ring of Fire

Creating pinholes with our own fingers.

Seven Rings of Fire

Spaces between tree leaves also casted eclipse shadows

We're already talking about a road trip to see the Hermit Eclipse on August 21, 2017. It will be a total solar eclipse that runs the full length of the continental United States.

Trajectory of 2017 total solar eclipse

See a closer view of our interactive map.

First stop, the Eiffel Tower.

We didn't spot hunchbacks but we found a huge line of tourists.

Louvre and its pyramid

Anyone that spends more than a minute in Paris can undoubtedly tell you the French really care about their history and art. We, on the other hand, are pretty immature.

Quarup not appreciating Parisian art.

Laure getting in touch with French culture. Ooh la la.

Suspicious looking sign.

We believe that a big part of any culture lies in its cuisine. So in true French style, we took our time to eat.

From top to bottom: Laure, Cappuccino, Croque Norvégien, and Croque Madame.

Luxor Obelisk.

See a closer view of our interactive map

Camel crossing warning

Under no circumstance would we recommend using Google Maps to find directions from Petra to the Dead Sea. We painfully learned this lesson as the road became narrower, then turned to gravel around the precipitous hillsides, and then turned into dirt and rocks.

Google Maps will direct you to your doom

After furiously cursing at Google and backtracking to the main road, we switched to a more tried-and-true strategy to find directions: the Lonely Planet Jordan guide book and common sense.