Before my husband and I had children we use to go to the Sequioas at least twice a year.  We lived in Los Angeles at the time.  After so many months of life in the City we would both feel the need to get back to nature and Sequioas were about 6 hours away.  Then we had our 1st son we still managed to go at least 1 time per year.  When he was one we moved to Northern Ca and were even closer to our favorite place on earth!  Then our son turned 4 and life just got busy!  Before we knew it we had 2 more kids and moved away from California.  Recently we realized it had been 8 years since we had been to the Sequioas!  We'll, we had to fix that!  As you can see we had a GREAT time!  We hiked, we picniced, we saw the wonderful trees and the beauty all around us.  It was funny because all day the words "He restoreth my soul." kept running through my mind.  Then on the way home my husband said to me "I don't know what it is about the Sequioas, but it restores my soul!"  Ahh, I love that man!

The biggest surprise for us was how much the park had changed in 8 years.  I figured change was out of the question in a National Park, but I was wrong.  There use to be a grocery store, gas stations, resturant and cabins in this one meadow.  Well, much to my surprise they have taken it all out and restored the meadow.  It was lovely.   We had stayed in those cabins years ago with my parents and it was weird to be there and realize it was all gone, but I would much rather see the place restored.  They did keep the building the grocery store was in and turned it into a museum.  Very nice.  One of the coolest schanged was that they have added tile "footprints" of some of the biggest trees near where the tree is so that you can see how big the diameter really is. 

Here is my son standing inside the footprint of one of the trees.

This is the tree that the footprint my son is standing in represents.

Amazingly that isn't even the biggest tree!

Here is the BIGGEST tree.  It is called General Sherman and is the largest living thing on earth.
To get in your head how BIG this tree is you have to look at how tiny the people look standing at the bottom of the tree!

To really realize how BIG this tree is here is a branch that fell off last January in a wind storm.  Here are my kids climbing on the branch.
I am pretty glad my kids were not anywhere near the park the day this branch fell!  It took out the fench and dented the sidewalk about 10 inches!  I can only imagine the impact had there not have been 6 feet of snow on the ground!

As you can tell I am in love with the Sequioas.  I am so glad we got to go and I got to take ALL my kids finally.  I can remember all those years we were trying to have kids when we would go there and I would sit and pray for children.  What a blessing to take them back and share the beauty of God's creation with my 3 miracles!

This is my favorite picture of the day.  My miracles and my honey getting a close up look at one of God's georgeous trees!

Here are a few more pictures for you to enjoy.  (I took 95 so I have to do something with them!  LOL)