San Francisco - Day 4 - Muir Woods

Our anniversary day turned out to be the best day of the trip...so far, anyways!  We had a great night's sleep at the Argonaut Hotel at Fisherman's Wharf, and walked to Boudin Bakery for a breakfast feast of egg on sourdough English muffin (Amy) and an egg-crabcake-sourdough English muffin sandwich (Chris).  Plus I got a huge tea for less than $2!  I told Chris we were coming here every morning!  I loved that this store, their flagship bakery, had glass viewing windows all around the bakery, so we could watch them making the zillions of loaves of bread.

Getting a raisin-chocolate chip loaf for our hike

We drove across the Golden Gate Bridge for the first time.  It was cool!  But the Mackinac Bridge is wayyyyy longer and I think way taller, too, so we weren't super impressed.

Walking from the parking lot to Muir Woods, we saw our first redwoods!  So exciting!  We also loved the ferns growing on every surface - look at the branch above my head.

Amazing cross section of an 1000+ year old redwood

 

Me in my happy place!  I squealed over and over and over again!  I have wanted to see "big trees" for sooooo long, and my dream finally came true!  I thanked Chris a million times for taking me here for our anniversary!

OK, we took almost 200 pics in Muir Woods, and it was hard to whittle them down.  Here are the ones with us in them, or with another person in them for scale.  It is so hard to imagine the immensity of these trees without a tiny person in the background to put them into perspective!

See the little hikers in blue in the back?  We took that trail back.

Surrounded by giants

Just the coolest walk ever.  See the person in red up ahead??

There he/she is again!

Lots of trees were burned out, and had cool "caves."  Also many were in "families," or a close circle around a dead tree.

It was cool out in the valley that morning, the gloves were a good idea!

The sunlight was beautiful

Chris took a bunch of panoramics, 180 degrees from horizon to horizon.  You still can't get 350 ft+ in perspective with a camera.

Can you imagine a more amazing place to go on a walk??

Hope I didn't bore you with tree pictures...because there are MANY more coming!  These pics are just from our morning walk!  The Muir Woods loop is under 2 miles long, so we (Amy) decided to go on another walk/hike in the area to see more redwoods.  That will be another post, because there are almost 200 more pictures to wade through for the afternoon hike!