What the Redwoods Did: Why We Travel Even When It Isn't the Perfect Time
There is never a perfect time. I know that now better than I've known almost anything.
2020 was hard for everyone. I won't pretend ours was harder. But I'll say this: we had put a deposit on a new build right before everything hit the fan. Spent months trying to sell our house in the middle of chaos and uncertainty. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, I got sick. Not Covid — something else, something that knocked me flat and then just stayed. A year of symptoms I couldn't explain. Doctors I couldn't get answers from. Specialists, tests, money we didn't have. A year of not feeling like myself and not knowing when — or whether — that would change.
It was in the middle of all of that when we planned a trip to the Redwoods.
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I genuinely didn't know if I could handle a one-hour drive, let alone a multi-day road trip across the western U.S. I don't know exactly why we decided to go. Maybe because we needed something to look forward to. Maybe because staying still wasn't helping. Maybe because some quiet part of me knew we needed it even though every practical part of me had a reason to wait.
We went anyway.
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I remember driving down the Avenue of the Giants and watching the road go nearly dark — even though it was a perfectly sunny day outside. The canopy just closes over you. And then we walked into the first grove and I remember just feeling like I could breathe deeply.
My son disappeared into the forest the way only kids can — fully, completely, without a backward glance. Within minutes he was deep in some world I wasn't invited to. Dragons lived in the hollow trunks. The roots were elven paths. Every shaft of light through the canopy was magic descending, and he was the only one who could see it properly. He wasn't on a trip. He was on a quest.
My daughter did something different. She slowed down. Fell behind. And when I looked back, she wasn't lost — she was just walking alone, running her fingers along the ferns, needing the quiet the way you need it when you've been surrounded by people for too long. She found something in that forest that I don't have a word for. Peace, maybe. The particular kind that comes when you finally feel small in a good way.
— — —
There is something undeniably magical about forests — especially old-growth forests. Maybe humans were never meant to be surrounded by this much concrete, noise, rushing, and artificial light. Maybe some ancient part of us still recognizes the medicine of trees.
I've since read that old-growth forests are among the environments where healing responses in the body actually increase — and honestly, I believe it. Whether the science is fully settled or not, I know how I felt there. Researchers have studied the effects of time in forests for years: lower cortisol, reduced stress, improved mood, even benefits to the immune system. In Japan, the practice of shinrin-yoku — forest bathing — is treated almost like preventative medicine.
But beyond the science, forests offer something harder to measure.
Perspective.
When you stand at the base of a tree that has been alive for two thousand years, your hard year starts to look like what it is — one hard year. Not nothing. Not small. But held inside something so much larger and older and quieter than the chaos you brought in with you.
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I'm not going to oversell it. The hard stuff was still there when we got home. I was still sick. Life was still complicated. Nothing had been solved. But something in me had been restored in a way I hadn't known I needed until it happened.
The Redwoods didn't fix anything. They just held us for a few days while we remembered who we were.
— — —
When people ask me about my favorite trips, this one comes to mind almost every time.
Not some bucket-list international adventure. Not the most exotic or expensive destination we've visited. Just the Redwoods. A place only a couple of states away. A trip where we didn't even have to board a plane.
And honestly, I love that — because it feels like proof of something I'm always trying to tell people.
Travel does not have to be far, luxurious, or wildly expensive to change you. Sometimes transformation happens quietly. Sometimes it happens on a misty trail beneath ancient trees while your kids run ahead, collecting leaves and strange treasures from the forest floor. Sometimes it happens when you finally step outside of your routine long enough to hear yourself think again.
The first time you stand beneath the Redwoods, something in your body goes quiet.
I needed that quieting more than I knew. My kids needed it too — each of them in their own completely different way.
— — —
That's why I do this.
Not to help families collect passport stamps or build a highlight reel. But because I have stood in a place that restored something in me I didn't know was broken — while I was sick, while everything was uncertain, while it was emphatically not the perfect time — and I want that for you too.
There is always a reason to wait.
Sometimes the most important thing you can do is go anyway.
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Roots & Wings is for families who want to travel but keep waiting for the right moment. You don't need everything figured out. You just need roots to come home to, and wings to take you there.
