Northern California January 2021

Seeing the massive coastal redwood trees in Northern California has been on Andrew’s bucket list for quite some time now. When we were able to score cheap flights to Hawaii from San Francisco but needed a few extra days to get COVID tested, we decided this was the perfect opportunity to make a pit stop on that trip!

We flew into San Francisco the last week of January and picked up a rental SUV. We brought with us Briar’s infant car seat and the twins booster seats but rented 2 full size car seats for the 2 middle girls. Thanks to COVID renting car seats has been even better than before! The past 3 times we have rented car seats they have been brand new still in the box and plastic packaging! We spent a few hours in San Francisco seeing the sites like the Golden Gate Bridge and we also had to stop by City Health Urgent Care to get our COVID tests done for Hawaii. You can read all about how to get into Hawaii HERE

From San Francisco we headed north to our AirBNB rental in a tiny little town called Trinidad, CA. This town completely stole our hearts! It’s right on the pacific coast with a beautiful harbor and pier full of crab fishing boats and a nice sandy beach! The town itself has several little restaurants and coffee shops. Due to covid regulations everything was open for take out only but we still enjoyed every bit of it! Our rental house was spectacular with panoramic views of the Pacific Ocean and it sure helped that the host was wonderful! Him and Andrew exchanged numbers and struck up quite a friendship. The pictures posed below are from the backyard of our rental house.

The main reason we chose this house, aside from is fantastic views and amazing living space for our large family, is because of its location. Trinidad sits just outside the Redwood Forest National and State Parks so we took a full day to explore the forest and we’re not disappointed! The amazing size of these trees just blew our minds!

Between our house and the park entrance pretty much in the middle of nowhere we found a little wood carving shop on the side of the road. We stopped in and chose a giant slab of redwood for the man to carve our name into. He carved it and shipped it home for us so we didn’t get to see it until weeks later but it turned out perfect! For dinner that night we also discovered that the kids love clams! The devoured and entire bucket full of them!

The next morning we needed to head back to San Francisco for our early flight to Hawaii the following day, but since we had all day we decided to start our journey at the beginning of California’s famous scenic Highway 1 and follow it all the way down the coast. This route is not for the faint of heart! I repeat, if you are scared of heights or cliffs, don’t do it! I barely made it through this part of our journey. All of Highway 1 terrified me! The road just crumbles off giant cliffs into the ocean and I’m not even exaggerating, there are multiple places where the road has actually fallen off into the ocean and they are repairing it. The cliffs are insanely high and the road is nothing but 90 and 180° curves around them. I honestly was scared and it was hard for me to enjoy the beauty of the scenery because of it. Oh to be a blissfully ignorant child in the back seat.

Before we made it to the beginning of Highway 1 though we started through the scenic trail of the giants detour which definitely lived up to its name!

Just before dusk we made it to a beautiful beach right outside San Francisco and stopped for a little fun before heading to our hotel by the airport for the night. We loved our short time in Northern California and highly recommend the beautiful town of Trinidad! I can’t imagine how fun it is there in the warm summer months and without COVID!