JOMEL Adventures Positivity (def): "Anything other than being in the office."

We did not yet have the camping and national parks out of our system so next stop was to see the giant redwoods in Redwood National Park in the far north west of California. We arrived at the Redwoods on Mon 19th May, that is 3 months ago (I'm a little behind withh journal entries!) so I may have forgotten some of the details sorry!
We got into the national park pretty late, after a 9 hour drive- that tended to be our way of doing things. Jo had booked our campsite online so as not to have to actually speak to anyone and had read the directions on how to get there wrong. So after a couple wron turns we ended upat an exposed and nasty looking camping beach. This would not do so I waved down a parks officer who pointed us in the right direction for our real campsite, in the trees. And it was beautiful- alongside a running river, so lush and green. Northern California was so so green and beautiful after the hot and dry we'd just been in. Of course, it did rain a lot though. So we set up camp, had dinner and crashed for the night.
Next day we headed out for a couple shorter hikes, but not before seeing a herd of elk, with long legs and white bums! Aa great photo opportunity reminding us that we really are just tourists.
After talking to the state and national parks office we decided to hike the Rhododendron trail. Supposedly not the tallest trees in the forrest (not that you can tell from the ground) but much more green and beautiful. Alas, we took another wrong turn (my fault this time) and the hike which should have taken just a couple hours, ended up taking 5. We did see a lot of banana slugs though! They're these huge, yellow, slimy things, and we saw lots of moss and funghi...which funnily enough I am finding more and more fascinating (much to Jo's disgust). It was getting to late afternoon then, and it was raining so we took a change of pace and drove to out next trail head, the top of Tall Trees Grove. We debated whether to hike down Tall Trees Grove. We had one of those "but when are we ever going to be back here" conversations and eventually we hiked at speed down to the bottom and back up. A pretty hike, but we probably did it for the wrong reason :)
We camped a second night at our stunningly green campsite and then set out early next morning for our next wwoofing stop in Oregon.