Road trip tent camping anyone?

My dad was an avid fresh-water fisherman so I was raised tent camping for summer vacations in the western states.
We never had a problem with bears but my grandparents had a great "bear story" from when they were younger. They had driven to Yellowstone in an early Ford coupe with a canvas insert in the top. My grandmother had left a box of chocolate-covered cherries in the car and they were awoken in the middle of the night by noises outside wherever they were staying. They found a bear had evidently smelled the candy, ripped through the canvas top and was sitting in the front seat enjoying the candy.
One of the last tent camping trips I went on with my parents we pitched the tent at the base of a redwood in Big Basin Redwoods State Park (CA). We almost left the tent there because my dad had driven one of the tent spikes into a root of the redwood. It took us over an hour to work that single spike out of the root.