The Tradition of Slug-Searching

Thalia and I took our annual trip to the Redwoods... we were following our 'tradition' of looking for banana slugs...

we weren't successful...

but not for lack of trying...
We had a little picnic on a park bench within the Lady Bird Johnson Grove...
I love having a picnic with Thalia! We were now ready to search out the elusive slugs...A redwood forest is full of beauty... from these flowers, which I can't remember the name of...

to beautiful berries...
Thalia was a trooper for her photographing Mimi...

She even found a lot of spots that she thought would make a good picture.
Thalia decided there were too many mosquitos (there were a FEW) and so she wore her hood and sunglasses...

Other people there thought she might be someone famous...she told me this after she heard a family whispering about her. I bet she will be famous someday, probably as a singer/guitar player.
She's already famous to me and her Papa!
We found a lot of downed logs to climb on...


and then, of course, if you know Thalia, you know she has a love of all things 'animal'...
such as this snail.
Well, you can't really SEE the love in this picture, but trust me, it was there. She thought the snail peed on her here...

She fed it some leaves... and then we returned it to its habitat and ventured on...




I love that she loves nature so much... look at this forests... it's simply beautiful.
There are huge ferns... as tall as Thalia, some even taller!


I have pictures from years past of Joshua and Donnie trying to scale these two trees - one foot on each. Neither of them ever made it very high, thank goodness.
This huge log had some natural steps so even a Mimi in flip-flops could climb on it.

See that log across from the one Thalia is sitting on?
Here she goes...crawling along... about ready to stand up and walk along it...
She didn't make it too far...deciding it might be dangerous.
At the end of the hike through the redwoods, we were a bit disappointed because we had not seen a banana slug... but we enjoyed the journey!