At Jedediah Smith's park in Crescent City, CA, we drove through an off-the-beaten-path redwoods dirt path trail called "Stout Grove". It was amazing, and far off the more touristy redwoods trails. The trees were huge, silent, and plentiful. The air was sweet and pure. My favorite tree we only discovered on our second drive through. It had a huge cave at its base, which the kids promptly all went into - even Casper. No fears about spiders or bugs or bats or anything else, they just wanted to get into the belly of the behemoth. Once all four were in, they shined flashlights around inside and made declarations of amazement. They begged Angie and me to go in. It took some courage, but we both went in. The craziest thing was that when I shone my flashlight up inside the huge tree, I noticed that the whole thing was completely hollowed out - and I could see all the way to the top!! Incredible!!

We had a loooooooong day of driving yesterday, I fixed a flat in the middle of a desert, we visited the Bonneville Salt Flats, and got bored of being in the car. We found out that people raced cars at over 600MPH on those flats. We dared not drive the van out though.

Today In Salt Lake City we swam all day, in fact we did two rounds: the sunny round and the dark skies round. Both were fun. The hottub was a little too hot, but the pool was just right. Everyone got plenty of Vitamin D. There were also plenty of stokes that arrived to sun themselves without even getting in to swim. Well, one bearded stoke with a Jamaica bathing suit got in for about 3 minutes but that was it. I was glad because I really didn't want to swim in stoke beardy pool water.

The best part of the day to me was our short venture out into town for pizza just about 10PM. As we left the hotel, we found a small overlook that gave us a panoramic view of the entire metropolitan area. Now fireworks are legal in Utah, and I'll say that EVERYONE was exercising their right to shoot them off. If I told you we could see hundreds of firework displays all at once, you wouldn't believe me. But we DID. We saw huge ones, small ones, colorful ones near and far. It was literally impossible to count the number of explosions we saw across the sky - easily in the hundreds every second. It was probably the most amazing 4th of July display I'd ever seen. Instead of seeing one display, we saw ALL of them!!  I wish my dad could've been there. But my family was, so it was cool.