Redwoods 2019 – Prairie Creek State Park, CA
The redwoods have a magical way of calling us back, so we decided to spend our spring break in the redwoods for the third year in a row.
Camping in the redwoods with kids, has been one of our favorite trips. Check out the picture below, the sky is just so clear, I was constantly in awe.
It was forecast to rain the entire trip, so about 2 Hours outside of Crescent city we bought seven umbrellas at the grocery outlet for five dollars each. Amazing find, and it made our redwoods experience that much more enjoyable.
We hiked a lot! 3 to 5 miles a day. Prairie Creek was only at 20% occupancy, and you don’t need a reservation until May. The rain wasn’t that bad, five of the seven days just had light sprinkles, the other two it rained quite a bit, but with umbrellas you’re good to go.
We found some amazing trails, and the kids found plenty of trees to climb on.
Make sure to bring an extra pair of shoes. It was handy to have a heater in our pop-up trailer that we could put the shoes in front of. My wife found that sticking newspapers in the shoes also dries them out more quickly.
As you saw in the first photo, we camped out of the trees. The camp host told us that the Indians that had lived in that area also stayed in the prairies, and not under tree cover.
The kids loved riding scooters, and skateboarding around the loop. We didn’t need a reservation for our campsite, but if you were to use one of the four cabins on premise you would pay $80 a night, instead of $35 a night for the camp spot. You need a reservation for those though.
What else did we learn…
If the forecast says rain, all week, you can still have a great time:)
Pre-planning all the meals, with Brittany Preparing all of the meals ahead of time. That helped, and the lifetime cooler that keeps ice for over five days worked amazingly well.
We invited another family to come with us, that also had young children, they were positive, and happy, and they definitely added to the fun dynamic of the trip.
Attitude is everything, when on a long hike, playing games like “guess that animal” can keep the mood light, even if everyone just wants to put their head down and trudge through.
Buying four Kindle’s, and pre-loading them with mindnumbing videos helped the drive go faster, if the drive says it will take 16 hours on Google, count on 20.
Dale Majors 