Camping in Big Basin - By Anna

     Hi all!! Welcome back to our blog! Hope you all enjoyed Triniti's post last week, and Jessica's the week before. If you want to be updated when we post, subscribe to our Google+ page. We update it every time we post! Anyway... On to my post!


     Labor Day weekend we went camping with my cousins and aunt and uncle (my mom's sister and brother-in-law) and I had a blast! I got some cool pictures, and some pictures just of us that aren't so cool...

     Alise and Lenae (my four and three year old cousins, respectably) loved taking pictures with my camera. It was so cute!

Some trees really close to our camp. I love this picture!

Lenae and Alise (and my dad) at camp.

A picture one of my cousins took of me. :)

At Wilder State Park eating a picnic lunch.

     On the first full day we were there, we went to Wilder Ranch State Park. We took a trail that goes along the ocean, and saw some awesome things. Below are some pictures and descriptions...

A selfie with Lenae, me and Alise. They are so cute!

A flower at Wilder State Park.

One of the coves along the hike by the sea. There were a bunch of
seagulls! You can see some in the left of the picture

Fern Grotto on the trail. It was so cool and really pretty.

     The next day, we visited the Mystery Spot in Santa Cruz. It looked pretty real, but there was much debate later around the campfire about whether or not it was real or an optical illusion. We didn't reach a conclusion, but I personally think that it was real, but that they did throw some optical illusion in there to exaggerate the phenomenon.

The angle isn't super good on this picture, but
see this one for a better angle.

My little brother, Luke, on another thing that displays the 'mystery'
of the Mystery Spot.

     After the Mystery Spot, we visited the Santa Cruz wharf. We weren't there very long at all, but there were a bunch of sea lions at one point, and I got a cool picture:

This guy was posing! It was so funny. :)

More cute pictures... Love my little cousins!

     On Thursday, we mostly hung around camp. We took two hikes - one was about a mile long and everybody went on it, but I forgot to take my camera - so no pictures. To compensate, I brought my camera along on the second hike, which was about four and a half miles long. My family, my aunt, Alise and Lenae all went on it. Here's some pictures from that hike:

Alise and Luke on the inside a hollow tree.

One of the trails... I got a lot of cool pictures like
this, but I didn't want to put too many in this post.

On the hike we went up this huge hill. If you look in the picture above,
you can see where we started. This hill was smooth rock with some
gravel. It's called 'Slippery Slope' for a reason!\

     On Friday, we went to Natural Bridges State Park. We saw the bridge and a lot of sea anemones and several crabs in the tidepools, but it was hard to get a good picture. Below are several pictures...

Natural Bridges (or bridge). There used to be more, but they have all
worn away over the years.

A sea otter! This was one of the coolest sights of the day!

     The final day was mostly driving back home. We did find a banana slug on one of the trails. It was really cool cause I'd seen pictures and descriptions of them around. They are really yellow, even more than the picture makes it seem like.

     So that's a brief overview of our camping trip. If you ever have the chance to go to Big Basin or the area around there, I'd definitely recommend it. If you go to the mountains, though, be sure to bring bug spray! 

~Anna