Elfin Forest

We went on a few little day trips towards the end of the summer. We spent our mornings doing chores and deciding where to go. Then Spencer looked up geocaches in the area while we packed picnic lunches and lots of water. We enjoyed listening to books on C.D. while driving there and back. We did the Elfin Forest hike the week before school started. According to Facebook, a lot of schools around the country started that day; it felt like we were playing hooky. I loved having such a long summer.

We've done this hike several times. It's very short, but it has lots of great views of the bird estuary next to Morro Bay. I especially love all the egrets. There are tons of benches everywhere, and we stopped here to eat our lunch.

There were three geocaches along the hike, but we couldn't find any of them. That was frustrating. I don't know why they make them so difficult to find. This one was even surrounded by poison oak.

 We had fun anyway. Once again, we found some crazy trees to climb.

They played a game of seeing how many different trees they could climb without touching the ground.  

These are pigmy oak trees. They're 200 years old, which seems funny because they're so tiny. Off to the right of this picture is where Dave has taken the boys rock climbing.

We stopped at the Morro Bay museum on the way home for a potty break. I think Spencer bought shark teeth at the gift shop. We would have stayed longer, but Chloe was pulling everything off the shelves. There were some grumpy women there giving us the evil eye, so I figured it was time to go.

Sometimes it just helps to get everyone out of the house and go somewhere cooler. Hikes are always a good choice because they're free and they're good exercise.