One of my favorite childhood experiences was when my family and I took a trip to the Redwood Forest in California. We were living in Utah at the time, and my sister, my oldest sister, had just graduated high school, and so for a fun family vacation before she went to college. We were all able to drive to California in a day or so and go camping in the redwood forest. Now, if you don't know what a redwood tree is, it is one of the largest things on earth, one of the largest living organisms on earth.

And so these are trees that are thousands and millions of years old and ginormous, there is a photo of me and my family, and we're all holding hands and spread as far apart as we can while holding hands still. And the whole length of our family chain didn't even cover the half of the of the trees. You know, how big it was around and and so that's a little bit of a help to know how big these trees are.

But we were sleeping and camping in this in this forest, and it was a super, super beautiful, peaceful area. One of my favorite memories from that is there are a bunch of pine needles on the ground, and there were so many of them that it made the ground super soft. And so when you would sleep or when you would lay down, it was almost like you were laying on a mattress. Also, you could walk around the forest floor without shoes on, which was super nice, because you wouldn't be able to feel any rocks or spiky things. And so we would always just walk around our campsite and around little trails and such without shoes on. And that was fun. One kind of funny memory as well from that trip is our campsite was on the edge of this giant slope, a giant hill that was very steep. And one morning my parents were making food, I think, for the breakfast, and my dad got a little close to the edge of this slope, and my sister was out there helping him and and he kind of lost his footing for a little second there. And so he was flailing his arms, trying to get his his balance again. But he still couldn't. And he almost fell backwards down the slope. And the one closest to him was one of my older sisters. And instead of going and trying to help him, instead of trying to grab his arm and stabilize him, all she said was "bye dad". And so, thankfully, he didn't fall backwards. But that is always a funny memory that we we joke with this sister about is that she didn't try to save my dad. She just said, "bye, dad". And yeah, so that and many more experiences during this trip, that made one of my favorite memories from my childhood.