After breakfast in our room on Tuesday morning, we packed up to head to Giant Forest in Sequoia. We still hadn't seen any Sequoia trees, so we were pretty excited. The whole family piled into vehicles & headed out. It was about an hour's drive, but took us longer since we had to stop for pictures, and to let other cars pass our caravan!

It was a little drizzly in the Giant Forest area, but it was a nice light rain, and made the day actually quite pleasant. We first went to the Giant Forest Museum, which used to be a gift shop way back when there were cabins in this area (this is where our family used to stay before they tore down the cabins in the late 90's to protect the Sequoia trees). The Museum was neat; it had an exhibit that showed how big a Sequoia is compared to other "big" things, and even showed a Sequoia seed. It's amazing how the world's largest living thing can grow from such a tiny thing--God is so amazing! E found a Sequoia cone, and shook out a seed so that we could see how little it was.

R also enjoyed checking out the books, as she did everytime we went somewhere with a book section!

We took some pictures in front of the Sentinel Tree in front of the museum, then walked across the street to Round Meadow. This was so odd for me--the last time I was here almost 20 years ago, the dining hall looked down on the meadow, and our cabins were a short walk up the hill. Now there's no trace that any buildings ever existed. The dining hall was right between the two big trees in the following picture. It's cool how the forest reclaims its own.

It was also neat to see my kids doing the same things I did when I was a little girl: standing next to a Giant Sequoia tree & seeing how big they were in comparison!
Of course, the adults have to do the same thing!

We walked around the meadow & E read the signs to us (he's such a great reader!)
while we all swatted at mosquitoes. Ugh!

After we all got back together, we took a family picture before walking back to our cars.

Rachel was a little trooper all through the transfers between car & stroller, etc. She loves to see the camera come out! She turns into *such* a ham, all smiles & little teeth!

We drove by Morro Rock on the way from Round Meadow on the way to Crescent Meadow, but decided against climbing the rock this afternoon. Something about an exposed rock outcropping & a thunderstorm not sounding very appealing!

We couldn't miss driving through the tunnel log on the way either! How many people can say they've driven through a tree & lived to tell about it?!

Our next destination was Crescent Meadow. What was lovely about most of these places was that there were hardly any other people at any of them! It was just the 22 of us, and about a kajillion mosquitoes!

A huge tree had fallen across the meadow and we used it to shorten the hike around. Even just the root system is so big that it dwarfed the kids. Amazing.

We hurried to get back to our cabins in Kings Canyon, to get everyone cleaned up so that we could grill out for dinner. We had to toss all the kids in the bath, and the baby was especially happy to get all that insect repellant washed off!

My dad entertained the girls while we all worked to get dinner on, while E found his own entertainment (playing with glow sticks)! It was nice to have so much family around to help with our kids, since they're all pretty young. It was a good experience for us all!

We had a great dinner of carne asada that Gramma had brought, and everyone else pitched in a dish and helped with prep & cleanup. Once again, the kids crashed out after a very busy day!