Tree Hugger: Our Adventures Hugging Trees Around the World

🌳 Tree Hugger 

Allen and I drove across the U.S. to Disney World for our honeymoon. That trip set the pace and tone for the rest of our adventurous lives. We drove from Idaho to Key West in the Florida Keys and back again, before settling down in the alpine desert of Idaho. Since then, we’ve seen all 50 states.

I already wrote about the giant sequoias, the eucalyptus tree monarch butterfly grove on the Monterey Peninsula, and the live oak trees draped with Spanish moss in Florida in Chapter 1 of my book, I Can’t Miss the Encore. Every tree speaks to me. Every tree has a different unique energy, different from other tree species.  I love to hug trees (and rocks).

This is the rest of our tree-hugging story. 🌲💚

Across America’s Forests

I took mental notes of everything we’ve seen—from Idaho through the Midwest prairies and down to Florida.

We’ve visited the evergreens of the Northwest, the deciduous hardwood forests of Appalachia, and traveled up through Maine and the New England states, then down the East Coast through Georgia’s varied forests, where trees are wrapped in kudzu vines.

We canoed through the Okefenokee Swamp, where we found cypress trees flocked with eerie Spanish moss, surrounded by strange cypress knees and scores of alligators prowling beneath the water.

We’ve driven down the eastern Florida coast to the Everglades, and up the Gulf Coast, past live oak trees draped with moss, through Georgia and Florida, then on through the palms and everglades into the far southern subtropics.

Eucalyptus Adventures

We’ve driven through aromatic eucalyptus groves on the Cotopaxi Volcano in Ecuador, on the Island of Hawaii, and in California.

The world has borrowed the eucalyptus tree, which is indigenous only to Australia. Maybe someday I’ll make it to Australia. 🇦🇺

Ancient Trees That Refuse to Die

We’ve hiked among the world’s most ancient, gnarled, twisted, half-dead, hard-to-hug bristlecone pines in Cedar Breaks, Utah, and the Inyo Mountains of California.

These 4,000+ year-old trees refuse to give up. On the Mt. Whitney Trail grows a cousin of the bristlecone—the gorgeous foxtail pine, an “only” 3,000-year-old species.

It’s a bristlecone lookalike with cinnamon-colored bark, trunk, and limbs. As I hiked through the foxtail pine, I felt like I was in Jellystone National Park with Yogi Bear and Boo Boo, imagining them running off with a stolen picnic basket from inattentive picnickers. 🧺🐻

The Jungles of Ecuador

Our family has hugged the kapok trees in the Amazon jungles of Ecuador, with their huge buttress roots.

We’ve admired the tangled strangling fig, and met the thorny sandbox tree—a tree you definitely don’t want to hug!

We collected seeds from the “vegetable ivory” palm (or tagua palm), whose jungle seedpod is larger than a basketball. 🌰

The Banyans of Hawaii

In Hilo, Hawaii, we found massive banyan trees, each planted by a famous person.

These trees can cover entire city blocks, growing like a giant labyrinth and jungle gym combined.

Like most trees in Hawaii, banyans are not indigenous—not even the palm tree is native there!

Still, we’ve hugged palms in California, Okinawa (Japan), Hawaii, the Philippines, and all along the Gulf Coast—and even seen them in Guam from an airplane window. 🌴✈️

Giants of the West Coast

We’ve driven through the massive western coastal trees of the U.S. that thrive in the protected inland coasts of California, Oregon, and Washington.

The giant redwoods—350 feet tall with diameters up to 15 feet—are the tallest. Then come the Douglas fir, Sitka spruce, noble fir, ponderosa pine, western hemlock, and red cedar, some reaching 230 feet.

Each grove is surrounded by the giant groundcover wood sorrel. You’ll feel like a tiny bug when hugging these massive trees!

These giants grow in the Hoh Rainforest of Olympic National Park—a place impossible to describe in a few paragraphs. It’s a must-see experience. 🌧️🌿

The Thorny Acacia

Last is the drought-resistant, not-fun-to-hug thorny acacia tree we saw in the arid regions of Israel and the Sinai Peninsula—perhaps the very kind from which Christ’s crown of thorns was made. ✝️

🌿 Bonus: Thousand Oak Tree Tunnel

See the video I took while we drove through the Thousand Oak Tree Tunnel in Florida:
👉 Click to Watch

🌱 Growing My Own Tree of Life

Like Adam and Eve, by partaking of the fruit, I too had to partake—so I could fall, then rise, and begin to grow my own Tree of Life. 🌳✨