Friday 8/10/2018     I found that Ukiah is very close to a park with redwood trees called Montgomery Woods.  It was supposedly only about 15 miles away so we decided to go for a hike through the Redwood Groves.  It began as an ordinary two-lane road but shortly began getting narrower and narrower and full of steep, sharp curves.  Because the truck is so wide, I had to drive very slow on this road but it was a little thrilling.  It ended up taking us a lot longer than we thought because of the slow speed.  We found the small parking lot at the beginning of a two-mile loop hike and we began walking.  It turned out to be one of the best hikes we've taken.  It was a nice soft pine needle trail through a thick forest full of huge redwood trees.  The trees were magnificent but sadly we noticed that so many of them had been cut down probably over a hundred years ago.  The groves were all named after early pioneers of the redwood trees. We did manage to get a little lost because it the trail wasn't as well marked as it could have been and we walked over a mile past the spot where we should have turned on the return loop.  It turned into a 4 1/2 mile walk but we enjoyed it so much that it didn't matter.  You'll notice me modeling next to the trees in several of the pictures, that's because I wanted you to get the full effect of just how large these trees are.  At the beginning of the hike, they built a small patio with two picnic tables that we sat on for lunch.  After lunch, we drove back into Ukiah and very close to our campground we saw a huge plume of thick white smoke.  Luckily, the fire wasn't as close as it looked.  After dinner at a small neighborhood restaurant, we just went back to the campground for the evening.