re: an educational vacation

For some reason I always associate educational and well-planned vacations with my family, and expect less of the trips with my friends. That is why it is just kind of cool that some fun people and I rented a 10 passenger van yesterday to take an educational drive to the redwoods. Several people, spying the enormity of our van, stopped to even ask us if this was some sort of field trip for a school group. We looked THAT scholarly! (or that "special")

We drove up to the Avenue of the Giants. The trees were so tall! Shawn and Adam couldn't even touch the tops, and they were by far the tallest people there.

One of the best educational parts of the day was found in the visitor center. I learned that you should never just stick your hand into a mystery box labeled "touch and feel"...

...because someone might think it is a funny trick to make you touch a nasty old cougar leg without knowing it.

I also learned that the better looking you are, the easier it is to hold up an enormous felled tree with your bare hands.

We spent a surprising portion of the day just throwing stuff. This is the one thing that was nice about not having parents around. No one was there to tell us to quit running through the forest throwing rocks and sticks at eachother.


And big rocks into water.


It got so primal at one point that we were looking for a conch shell to settle things between us and finally had to just get back into the van and fall asleep or we would have killed eachother. Which would have been educational in its own way, I'm sure.