Guerneville is a small town in Northern California- it is between Napa and the ocean. It is a great place to visit for kids. I have been there every summer since I was born. What makes this place so great is the scenery. There are a ton of redwood trees, pine trees, cedar trees- basically it's a big forest that's close to San Francisco. It takes 10 hours of driving to get there from my house in San Diego. But it is worth it! After driving through a bunch of trees you get to an amazing river. It is called the Russian River because Russians discovered it a long time ago. On the river there is Johnson's Beach. Which has kayaks, canoes, surfboards, and everything that floats you can imagine. I go to Johnson's Beach though to skip rocks. They have a lot of good flat rocks to skip.
My 'Gompa' and 'Goma' live on the river and have a dock on the river. I dive and jump off of it. The water is warm in the summer. There is a dam downstream that keeps the water higher so it's deep enough to jump in. There is a little 'path' on the dam that fish can swim up to get around the dam.
If you don't feel like swimming, you can go to the 5&Dime in Guerneville like I did today. The 5&Dime is cool because it has lots of toys, candy, inner tubes, coloring books, gag jokes, and all kinds of stuff you need to have fun at the river- like a Magic 8 Ball!
My favorite thing at night to do at the Russian River is play Pee Wee Golf. It has been here since my mom was a little girl. It's a great course because it's challenging and has video games, a juke box, and some of the holes are a dinosaur, cannibals, there's a loop to hit your ball in, an ant hill, and they even put in a new hanglider above the course. Seriously.
Or maybe you like nature, then check out Armstrong Woods. It is a forest made of redwood trees. Some of the hikes are challenging, others are not. My Gompa has taken one trail that's super steep. Today me and my family got lost! Because my brother, Goma, and Gompa ran ahead.
Now that I'm old enough, I can play a real golf course like the one called Northwood. I like this course because it's pretty- it's surrounded by redwood trees and the grass is really green. At the end of the course, there is a restaurant called the 19th Hole that has the best hot dogs!
There's one last thing I want to talk about the Russian River and Guerneville. If you follow the Russian River west, you will hit one beach at the ocean called Jenner. There are a bunch of seals at the river mouth so that probably means sharks are nearby because sharks like to eat seals! Jenner is cold and one time we made a fort out of branches that had floated downstream. The really cool thing we and my brother do on the beach at Jenner is balance on old railroad tracks. I think they got there because they built a jetty to help direct the river to the sea. To wrap things up, Guerneville is a great place for kids!
