Driving through the Pacific Northwest and California has been really cool. I’m driving along for hours, minding my own business, when all of a sudden, I turn a corner and there’s a huge mountain or mountain range in front of me. It’s a pretty awesome surprise. Sometimes, the mountains stay with me for the rest of the drive. Other times, they disappear when I turn another corner and I wonder if I’m going to see them again every time the highway turns a little.

That is exactly what happened on my drive from Sacramento to Kings Canyon and Sequoia National Parks. I’m not sure which mountains I saw though. Maybe the Sierra Nevada? My Airbnb is in Shady Cove, an hour drive to each of the parks and then it’s another hour to various hikes in the parks. I was not looking forward to all that driving. Even though I had a restful weekend in Sacramento, I was exhausted when I arrived in Shady Cove. I keep trying to figure my body out because I’m sometimes exhausted when I think I should be feeling great and I sometimes feel energized when I think I should be feeling like crap. But there are too many variables, so I haven’t been able to figure it out. I’m at least trying to get better at listening to what my body needs each day.

On Tuesday, I stayed at my Airbnb because I really couldn’t deal with driving and hiking. On Wednesday, I was still tired and my legs felt heavier than usual, but I felt better than on Tuesday, so I drove to Sequoia. I was kind of underwhelmed by the sequoias. This was because of my ignorance and not the sequoias fault at all. They are actually very impressive trees. I was underwhelmed because I thought that there would be entire trails where I’d be surrounded by massive sequoias the size of General Sherman, the largest tree on earth by volume. In all the pictures I had seen of people at Sequoia, they were surrounded by these massive trees. I realized on Wednesday that those pictures were all taken in a small area where a few sequoias grow close together. The entire park is not like that. It just so happens that everyone posts pictures of themselves in the same location at the park.

In case you’re ignorant about sequoias like I was, I’m going to include pictures of different parts of the park in this post so you know what you’re getting into when you go. I started out on Wednesday by walking the Big Trees trail. The name of the trail didn’t help my ignorance. Don’t get me wrong, all the trees on the trail are big, but they are sequoias of different ages, heights, and widths, so they don’t all look as big as I expected them to be.This hike is around a meadow that is surrounded by sequoias. It was cool to learn that younger sequoias have more branches farther down their trunk to maximize the amount of sunlight they get. When they get older, they don’t need as many branches, so they only keep the ones at the top. I also learned that mature sequoias can survive fires and that sequoias actually depend on fires for reproduction.

After the Big Trees trail, I walked up the 400 steps carved into Moro Rock. The view from the top was stunning. Then I walked through Crescent Meadow and saw Tharp’s log. Tharp found a hollow fallen sequoia many years ago and turned it into his cabin. I had seen in AllTrails reviews that some people had seen bears on this trail. Bear spray isn’t allowed in these parks because there are only black bears, no grizzlies, and black bears usually leave you alone if you get big and yell at them. I was excited at the possibility of seeing a bear on this trail. I’ve come a long way since deciding not to hike in Yellowstone 5 weeks ago because I was terrified of bears. So I was walking downhill on the uneven dirt path, not looking at the ground because I was looking for bears. You might see where this is going at this point. I stepped wrong, twisted my ankle, and fell. But I was fine. I got up, dusted myself off, and kept going on my way without any pain. I didn’t see bears on the trail, but people who got back to the trailhead a little after I did said they did see some.

After that, I hiked the Congress Trail. This takes you by General Sherman and then to the two sequoia clusters where I’m guessing everyone takes the pictures they post. It’s called the Congress trail because one of the clusters is called the Senate and the other is called the House. And there’s also a tree called the President. This was my favorite trail, partly because I had adjusted my expectations by that point and partly because there are a lot of massive sequoias there and they were pretty cool.

As I was walking through the Senate, two guys came running back from farther along the trail and asked if I’d seen a bear. Someone had told them there was a bear about 100 m from the Senate. We looked for a few minutes, but then I continued along the trail. When I got closer to the House, there was a group of people who had found the bears. There was a mama bear and her cub. At one point, the mama bear started walking in our direction and we all started moving back, but then she turned around so we stayed and watched. I’ve now officially faced my fear of bears. Eventually, the two guys came back down the path and were able to see the bears too, in case you were wondering.

On Thursday, I went to Kings Canyon. I thought it was more beautiful than Sequoia. Walking through forests with massive trees is amazing, but we’ve already established that I’m a mountain person. I like big nature. Huge nature. Mountain sized nature, not sequoia sized nature. Driving through the canyon at Kings Canyon was spectacular. The views from the top were amazing, but I didn’t even have to see the views to be awed. The canyon walls I was driving next to were enough. And there are also sequoias in Kings Canyon if you prefer that, including General Grant, the second largest tree in the world by volume.

As I was walking through Grant Grove, where General Grant is, I was thinking about how cool it is that I get to see sequoias, despite my initial disappointment, and how crazy it is that my road trip is almost over. I’ve been on the road for 4.5 months and in just 3 weeks, I get to Nashville, the last official stop on my road trip. Though now I’m thinking of adding another leg to my road trip at the end of the summer. We’ll see what happens…

Remember a few paragraphs ago, when I said I twisted my ankle and fell? You thought I was fine. I thought I was fine. But during the short hikes I did in Kings Canyon through Zumwalt Meadow and Grant Grove, my ankle and my knee on the same leg started feeling achy. Luckily, I hadn’t planned to do as much walking that day as the day before because by the end of the day, my knee was even achier. I can walk and my knee feels more sore than painful, but I still decided to make today another rest day. This wasn’t a difficult decision because I wasn’t looking forward to another 4 hours of driving into and back from the parks, though there were a few more hikes I would have liked to do.

Today I’ve been sitting on the couch, reading and watching the new season of Sweet Magnolias on Netflix. The dialogue this season is full of quotes that are exactly what I need to hear right now. I won’t spoil it for any of you who are planning to watch it. The thing that resonated with me the most was the idea of “being in the soup”. One of the characters mentioned how we see caterpillars and we see butterflies, but we don’t see the soup inside the chrysalis that is the caterpillar becoming the butterfly. This resonated because I’ve been listening to Ella Langley’s song Butterfly Season on repeat during my road trip. The song exactly describes my life right now, to the point of saying “Don’t even know her, that girl from last October”. October was when I realized that my life had to change. I think I’m towards the end of my soup stage, soon to be in my butterfly season.

Tomorrow I’m driving to Joshua Tree National Park. I’ll only have 2 hours in the park on Sunday, but I figured it’s worth at least driving through it. Hopefully I’ll be able to use cruise control on the highway a lot tomorrow so my knee gets more rest. It didn’t like pressing the gas and brake on my winding mountain drive back from Kings Canyon yesterday.

P.S. I just watched another episode and one of the characters said that he’s in the soup with wings sticking out. I think that’s a more accurate description of where I’m at.