Day 6 of the PNW Adventure!

We started our day at the famous Dragon Gate in Chinatown.

San Francisco’s Chinatown is the

 largest Chinatown outside of China.

We shopped at the stores

and the markets

and found a giant wall of ramen noodles!

We even found a pharmacy.

We had a scrumptious lunch

and ate way too much!

We toured the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory
and watched the ladies hand fold the fortune cookies! They gave us warm samples right off the machine.

This tiny factory makes 10,000 fortune cookies a day!

There were lots of varieties so of course we got some to try!

Next, we rode a cable car through the hilly San Francisco streets!

At first we were standing (Harper was nervous about that)

but as people got off, we were able to sit down.

We took the cable car to Ghirardelli Square.

We checked out the shops there then headed back to Fisherman’s Wharf.  

We played on the piano stairs

and got lost in a mirror maze!

Eventually, we made our way out and laughed at our long legs and torso 😁  in the carnival mirrors.

Ashley’s arms were even longer than they usually are!

Dinner was at Boudin Bakery where they make cute animal shapes out of sourdough bread.

I think we wore Harper out on our vacation!

Day 5 of the PNW Adventure!

We started our day at Glass Beach in MacKerricher State Park in Fort Bragg, California.

Glass Beach gets its name from the smooth colorful glass

mixed in with the pebbly beach.

We went during low tide so we could see it.

There are lots of tide pools filled with sea life.

 During high tide, this area is underwater.

We saw some sea lions resting on the rocks.

Next, we drove to Santa Rosa to see the Snoopy Gallery at

the Charles M. Schultz museum.

Harper saw all of her favorite characters.

She got to play doctor

and we even saw a Snoopy topiary!

Next up was a trip across the Golden Gate Bridge

 to get to San Francisco.

We checked into our hotel and walked down to Fisherman’s Wharf to do some shopping.
Harper’s favorite store was called It’s Sugar.  It is the world’s largest candy department store.

She was excited about the giant Kit Kat bar

and all the different kinds of Nerds.

Our favorite store at Pier 39 was Lefty’s! Everything in the store was made for left handed people!
At the end of the pier,

 we saw lots of sea lions resting in the sun.

We could see Alcatraz too!

Harper and I had never been to In-N-Out, 

so we went there for dinner.

Ashley taught us how to order from the secret menu.

It was really great way to end our day!

Day 4 of the PNW Adventure!

We started off day 4 at Trees of Mystery.

I’ve always wanted to see the Redwoods, and this place taught us all about them.  It’s hard to tell in the pictures how giant these trees are!

Harper climbed under this one.

There was a Canopy Trail suspended high in the trees

and we rode a gondola to get a view from the top!

We drove through Redwoods National and State Park.

Our next stop was the Fern Canyon in the Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park.

To get there, we had to drive our rental car down a one lane dirt road (traffic travels in both directions 😳) for 8 miles and through 2 creeks.

When we got to the dirt road, it was closed for a project so we had a picnic lunch in the car.

After the road opened, we drove as far as we could, then parked and started our hike.

Much of the hike was through a creek.  We were prepared with water shoes, but Harper wasn’t too thrilled with this part of the adventure.

There were lots of obstacles to climb over

and even some to limbo under.

Eventually Harper figured out that tromping through a creek on a hike was fun!

We finally made it to Fern Canyon!

Jurassic Park was filmed in this canyon.  There were ferns everywhere.

Next, we saw more redwoods as we drove down the Avenue of Giants and even drove our rental car through a giant tree . It barely fit!