Last week Mr. Cleaver and I headed out to Northern California to visit my family. The weather was beautiful and we ate enough food for the entire month of January - in fact most of my trip photos were of food, so I'm going to give the eats their own post.

Today I wanted to focus on the last day of our trip when my big brother (hi Luke!) took us to Muir Woods and San Francisco before depositing us at the airport to catch our red eye back to Maine, where it promptly snowed 8 inches on our return.

Luke had suggested we go to Muir Woods, and since Mr. Cleaver had never seen a giant redwood tree, I heartily agreed!

If you're not familiar with redwoods, the coastal redwoods are the tallest living trees in the world and can grow up to 380 ft (115m) high. These amazing trees grow only in a small region of Northern California and the the Pacific Northwest and I visited them often growing up on camping trips with my family.

Perhaps even more amazing is that these giant trees grow from the tiniest pinecones!

Coming from Maine, it was fun to see how green everything was, even if the non-evergreens had lost their leaves.

For a complete 180 from our woodland trekking, we ended the afternoon at Ghiradelli Square and Pier 39 in San Francisco- the epitome of touristy hustle and bustle.

The Bourdin Sourdough Bakery

Checking out the Sea Lions at Pier 39

Sunset over the Golden Gate Bridge.