Day Seventeen -- to Redwood National Park

Day 17 – Sunset Bay State Park, OR, to Jedediah Smith Redwood State Park, CA

** Note- I'm noticing that the Blog automatically dates our entries when we post them. FYI, the dates are way off. I'm behind by a few days, and am posting as I can. So really, this didn't all happen on July 5. It happened on Day 17, which was ... last Sunday?

I slept in the Teardrop and woke early this morning when I heard Clare, from the tent, call out in her sleep for her missing Bubba. Poor baby!
I was too distressed to go back to sleep, so I got up, showered, dressed, made breakfast and continued to search for the Bubba before anyone else awoke. I re-checked the car, the trailer, the bathrooms and the paths to and from the bathrooms, and I even checked the Junior Ranger station, which I’m not even sure Clare visited. Then, convinced that someone must have swiped the Bubba from our campsite, I started to peer into other people’s campsites, suspiciously eyeing their worn dog mats or the old towels they use to wipe off their picnic tables, prepared to confront the thieves and take the Bubba back. I considered using the kids’ crayons and drawing paper to make a sign to post on the bathroom door that would read: “Lost: One well-loved security blanket. Used to be white. Answers to the name ‘Bubba.’” But if I made one, I’d want to make 30 and post them all over the campground, and I didn’t have the time or the resources to do that.
Despite the tragedy, Clare woke up in relatively good spirits. Keith said she had called out for it several times through the night. She asked for it again this morning, and was clearly mourning its loss, but, when she’s not thinking about it, she’s the same old Clare: cheerful and bright. Perhaps life will go on.
We had pretty much given up on finding the Bubba, and started to formulate a contingency plan that involved having someone in Lafayette break into our house to get the substitute Bubba from Clare’s bedroom and overnighting it to us. Meanwhile, as we broke down camp, I found a penny on the floor of the tent and held on to it for good luck – hoping there was still a chance the Bubba would show up.
We only had a two- or three-hour drive to get to the next campsite, farther down the coast, so we didn’t have to hit the road immediately. We joined a 10:30 a.m. (low-tide) ranger-led walk down to the tide pools at Cape Arago. As we clambered around a rocky area about the size of a football field, park ranger Stephanie showed us where to find all the cool creatures and the kids had fun discovering hermit crabs, sea stars, sea anemones and more. After more than an hour, Clare started to get tired and weepy and was craving her Bubba. My heart was breaking for her. It was getting to be time to go, anyway, so we climbed back up out of the bay and piled into the car.
On the way out, we decided to swing into the gift shop at Shore Acres State Park, just to be sure we hadn’t left the Bubba there – even though we don’t remember Clare having it there at all. I left everyone in the car, ducked quickly into the shop and asked if they had by chance found a well-loved security blanket that may or may not have been left there. The cashiers shook their heads and tried to look sympathetic, saying that anything left there would have been turned over to park service lost-and-found – and good luck trying to get someone to open up lost-and-found for you on a Sunday. Sigh.
Then the cashiers looked at each other and added, almost as an afterthought, “We DID find an old towel on the floor of the shop this morning. We couldn’t figure out where it came from, so we threw it away. Does your blanket look like a towel?” My heart skipped a beat. “I guess it could be confused for a towel,” I said. “Do you think you could pull it out of the trash and I’ll see if it’s ours?” So one of the women went to the back office, came out with a large waste basket and pulled out … The Bubba! I almost wept with relief, I was so happy to see it. I brought it out to the car, opened the door and held it out to Clare, who snatched it from my hands, hugged it to her face and immediately stuck her fingers in her mouth as her eyes glazed over with pleasure. Suddenly, everything was right in the world.
From there, we got back on the highway and headed down the coast. What a stunning drive! The road winds its way south along high bluffs, and from there we could see the turquoise, white-capped ocean surging toward the shore, and misty, rainforest-y mountains sloping down to meet it. At other points in the drive we were at sea level and could see miles of windswept grass and rolling dunes.
We arrived at Jedediah Smith Redwood State Park near Crescent City, CA, around 6 p.m., which is unusual. Our trip has been carefully planned with assistance from Mapquest, which gives estimated drive-times that have been at least 20 percent shorter than our actual time enroute. I guess we’re driving a bit slower, with the trailer, and with stops for lunch and sightseeing, everything is taking much longer; until tonight, we’ve been rolling in to campgrounds around 7 or even later, and usually still have to cook and serve dinner after setting up the camp. The kids haven’t been getting to bed until after 9, and sometimes 10 p.m., and we cringe when we realize that it’s midnight or 1 a.m. at home. At least they’re sleeping later in the morning. And I guess that’s part of the fun of vacation: We’re on our own schedule. We go to sleep when we’re tired and wake up when we’re not. We eat when we’re hungry, even if it’s breakfast at 10:30 and lunch at 3. We’re flexible.
The campground is lush and lovely, with tall redwoods towering over us and man-size ferns growing beneath them. It’s all so prehistoric. We expect a dinosaur to come crashing through the campsite any minute.