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A “Tree”-mendous Adventure!
AS YOU KNOW, I’ve been going on for weeks and weeks, right here on the ol’ blog, about a little vacation I’ve been planning. Why, every day I’ve been talking about it!
Well, it’s finally here!
Yesterday we headed northeast a piece, and brother, anyone who tells you that you can’t do Sequoia National Park (631 square miles, and just 4-1/2 hours outside of Los Angeles by car) in one day has apparently never heard of any of those energy shots I’m still trying to review.
Up there’s where the tall timber is, brother – trees so big around that even the gentle giant of the sea, the giant squid, would be hard pressed to wrap its “tentacles,” or feelers, around one of their trunks. And wouldn’t that be something to see!
We stopped first at the visitor center so that I could distract the park ranger there by asking inane questions (“What time is Old Faithful’s next show?,” “How long is the wait for It’s a Small World?” and so on) while my street urchins-in-training, Enoch and Little Bess, practiced their trade by pocketing key chains and post cards to sell to their school chums back home.
Then I got my hands on some rubberized bear scat in one of those educational, interactive animal feces displays.
(Now that I know what bear dung looks like, evidence further points to it being one of my neighbors crapping on the windshield of my car every night.)
Next it was back in the car to get the hell out of there!
A half-hour of heart-stoppingly steep roads along frightening drop-offs, and that’s when the kids realize they forgot to get their goddamn National Parks Passports stamped. So after a lot of arguing, whining and crying, I composed myself and headed back down to the visitor center.
And then, an hour or so later up the same treacherous mountain roads with hairpin switchbacks galore, we finally got to the trees.
They are, in a word, big.
But you want to see the famous one: good ol’ General Sherman, the largest tree on earth! Not the tallest, not the oldest, not the widest, but somehow the largest. I don’t understand it either. There were informative plaques around explaining it – but you don’t drive hundreds and hundreds of miles loopy on cheap 5-Hour Energy knockoffs to stand around reading words!
So I’m going to go out on a limb here (a little tree humor for ya) and presume that by “the largest” the park service means you could make more coffee tables from thin cross-sections of its trunk than any other.
Speaking of which: Join me, won’t you, in petitioning the White House to let us cut down this glorious beast and do just that. General Sherman is in fact big enough to make coffee tables for every man, woman and child in this country legally.*
*Before your precious Obama crams illegal alien amnesty down our throats! Hey! I don’t want to hear it! This is not a political blog!
Anyway, here what you’ve been waiting for: Yours truly: your humble blogger and pal Ted in front of the World’s Largest Tree.
Well, sort of.
Rest assured, if I ever get up there again (Not likely! The brakes on the car are shot from coming back down the mountain!) I’m going to figure out the stupid timer on the camera and charge the damn batteries the night before just in case I need to take more than one photo.
Ted Parsnips
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