Redding and Shasta

Our second and final camping trip of the summer was to Lassen Volcanic National Park. However, since it’s about a 4-5 hour drive northeast of us we decided to drive up the day before the camping started and stay overnight in Redding. We had a surprisingly good time on this initial stop! We arrived in the late afternoon and, after grabbing what we needed from the van, we took a little walk around.

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Mostly the kids just wanted to try out Pokemon Go, but Bruce’s phone was dying and the phone the kids use needs wifi, so that didn’t last very long.

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We had dinner at a Mexican place near our hotel and walked around a little more after dinner before crashing. As an aside, I love this shot of all of our bikes crowding up the hotel room. I’m paranoid about them being stolen from the bike rack, so we brought them in.

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After breakfast at the hotel the next morning we took off on a bike ride on the Sacramento River Trail. It was a lovely ride, mostly flat but with a few hills to make sure we were paying attention. Here are some shots from along the way.

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The boys really liked the ribbon bridge and we rode across it several times.

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Sadly, we had some technical difficulties on the way back. My left pedal fell off and because the crank was stripped inside it wouldn’t go back on. Thankfully Bruce managed to MacGyver his pedal on my bike (they attach differently) and my pedal went on his bike.

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So, feeling a little uneven, we managed to make it back to the hotel.

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After getting cleaned up and packed, we checked out of the hotel, but we weren’t ready to leave Redding just yet. We headed over to the Turtle Bay Exploration Park, which we’d read good things about. It didn’t disappoint. First stop was the Sundial Bridge, which is super cool and very hard to photograph!

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This is my best outcome from many attempts to get it all in one picture.

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And it was perfectly accurate!

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We explored the inside of the museum too — good thing because it was about a million degrees outside. Lots of cool science and music stuff.

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When we were done inside we made one last stop outside at the Parrot Playhouse to see the lorikeets. Ezra loved this part.

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Bruce, too.

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Here’s a short video of a couple of the birds fighting for Bruce’s offering.

After Redding our initial plan had been to go straight to Lassen, but we decided on one more detour — to Shasta Dam. I’m glad we changed the plan because it was quite impressive.

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Lake Shasta with Mount Shasta in the background:

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We missed the tour but did spend some time in the visitors center which included footage from Huell Howser’s show about it. Very interesting, but still incredibly hot outside, so we were happy to get back into the air conditioned van and drive to our final destination.