Day 8, 25th August 2011. San Francisco - Redwood National Park

We had to meet at 8am in the lobby to leave this morning. It was horrible waking up, I was so tired and I had a really sore throat. Gary went across the road to get a Subway for breakfast but I couldn't eat anything.
We spent 7 hours driving today to get to Redwood National Park, we didn't really stop anywhere interesting, just to eat lunch and stretch our legs.

We arrived at Redwood in late afternoon, went to the visitor center to get maps, and we had to watch a short video that made it feel like we were on a school trip. The weather had changed drastically from San Fran and it was a lot greyer.



We did a short hike through the forest to see the really tall Redwood trees. It was only about an hour and was nice but not that interesting.

Afterwards, we headed to camp and got our tents set up. This was the first night that we had to start doing jobs arund camp. My group (me, Lauren and Daniel) were on van cleaning which was actually really easy and only took 5 minutes.

Lauren made me a friendship bracelet, the first of many, my wrists are now full of them! We also had to 'bear proof' the camp tonight as bears had been spotted nearby. That meant we had to lock away anything at all that was scented because it could attract bears. We quickly checked our tents to take out anything the bears might smell but wasn't too worried about it.

After dinner, Gary and I had showers and then did our laundry for the first time ever. Luckily Caroline was there too to kind of make sure we were doing it right. The laundry took us quite a while so we just sat in the laundry room with Shannon and Caroline chatting and I think we finished it at about 11pm.

We were just putting away all our laundry in our tent when a guy came over and told Shannon that there was a bear nearby if we wanted to see!! It was about 100ft away from where our tents were, it was a small one that had just wandered out of the forest and it looked like it was eating something. We of course couldn't get too close to it but it was so cool to see a real bear! I couldn't get any good pictures, they all came out like the one below, so you can't see it but  promise you there is a bear there! It was so exciting at the time so it sucks I have no photos..

We then realised we should be a bit more thorough with our bear proofing, it took seeing an actual bear to reaise that, so we double and triple checked our tents before going to sleep.