So this is our first proper road trip! It’s all very exciting! It what should come as no surprise, we were not ready for trip! Work and life was definitely ruling the lead up to vacation time, but we sure I did. We packed up our little Ford C-Max with camping gear ad essentials (clothes & @kevinfromfinance) and started our adventure.

Sequoia National Forest

Ok, technically our stop on this trip is Lake Isabella. We booked a cabin at the KOA here. The cabins are a good little, bit like camping, but not, which we needed for Kevin at the start. No need to start stressing him out at the start of the trip. It’s not a big campsite here but it was good enough. Hot as hell though, so we were very thankful that the cabins came with aircon and the pool for cooling down. After the drive down from LA our first night was just about eating dinner and drinking some wine, nothing too exciting, but delicious. Mental note for next time: red wine in 100f/ 38c temperatures if going to leave you very dehydrated the next morning!

The next day, it was off to do what we came here for: check out the Sequoia National Forest. Like all US National parks, it is limited what you can do with dogs. But, they have a great walk, the Trail of 100 Giants that is dog friendly which meant we all got to have a great experience. Al & I were awed by the giant trees, Kevin was entertained by all the sniffing and running into new friends.

The trees here are amazing!!! They are friggin huge and they have this weird symbiotic relationship with other trees which mean they merge together but still stay separate, so crazy! Now here’s the thing, when I was little my parents used to take me on holidays to all these beautiful places in West Australia. My dad used to take all these photos of trees and I would roll my eyes “oh look another tree”, guess what I do now? Yup, 97 photos & videos of trees from a 1.4 mile tree walk.

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Kernsville

Just down from Sequoia is Kernsville, sitting on the river, it’s a great place to stop for lunch. We kicked off our brewery tour of the West Coast at the Kern River Brewing Company. They’ve got a decent size patio area which is dog friendly, just what we needed.

Al ordered the pulled pork sandwich and I got the grilled chicken, both were really nice. It’s easy for a chicken sandwich to come out dry, but not this one! I definitely recommend a little stop here.

After you refuel head down to the Kern river to cool off. It’s a fast moving river so Kevin and I only splashed around on the edges. There were heaps of people taking advantage of the river, setting up chairs in the shallows (I love this) as well as floating down on tubes in the current. Sneak some beers from the brewery down and you’ll have a whole day of fun.

Silver City Ghost Town

There’s no way we were passing up a ghost town! This town is about 30 mins from Lake Isabella, the long way around to Kernsville, but a detour we had to take. It turns out it isn’t a “real” ghost town, all the buildings have been moved from other places for preservation. But who cares really? It’s still cool that the old buildings have been kept.

It’s about $10 to get in, just pay the money, they’re using it for the upkeep of the place. There’s a guy who will give you a spiel at the start, I can’t really remember everything he was saying because I was focusing too much on his story voice 😂😂. The little town is dog friendly too, which saved us having to go in 1 at a time. If you like old crap, there’s heaps of it in the antique stores around it. As you can probably guess, I am not into it.

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This stop was totally worth it for the Sequoias. I just wish you could go in more with a dog. I think I need to perhaps drive around in the forest more. We totally missed the tree over the road that you can drive under, I thought that was in the Redwoods!