Yosemite: Day 1

We drove from Sonora to Yosemite and back both days which takes awhile...and no matter which road we took it was so incredibly curvy and windy...me with bad ears got pretty nauseated. There was a good 20 miles of it! Blech! That was the low point of each day, the two hours in and out. I was really nauseated the first four days of the trip what with flying and then these roads.

We spent the first day in Yosemite in the high country- we got up to like 7000 feet! It was a little hard to breathe. We had great weather, it was warm and sunny but not too hot, though I did get a bit pink.

In Yosemite you can drive around in the park and and get to most picturesque spots without having to do too much hiking. There were trails to waterfalls but we didn't do them. Plenty to see already!

It's so pretty there, basically everywhere you look is snapworthy. That's an understatement. I took so many pictures!

See for yourself...

There was this cute lookout building at Glacier Point, I loved the stonework:

Laura got some shots of me being a tourist:

We finished the day by seeing the giant sequoias, they were so neat!

This was the root ball of one that had fallen a long time ago. I liked this fallen sequoia, it was huge! I loved the texture of the roots. Who knows when it fell, but troops posed for pictures (they rode horses onto it!) with it from 1891 to 1914. Sequoias have tannin-rich wood, which gives them their orange color and helps preserve them from decay and insects. It’s been on the ground for at least a century, and it’ll still be here for a long time to come.

There was a lot of fire damage in the area- sequoias need fire to release their pinecone seeds, but not this much fire. The park does controlled burns for this purpose. It was interesting to see the trees that were burned at the bottom and fine at the top.

We saw the “Grizzly Giant” tree that is the oldest and estimated to be 1790 years old. We saw the surviving tunnel tree (there was another one that fell in the 60’s) that was tunneled through in 1895! We also saw deer while walking through the sequoias, they were scrawny little things in comparison to our hefty PA deer!

Funny story: When we stopped to eat our picnic lunch, Mom opened the mustard for me (my hands were full!) and the mustard exploded due to the high altitude and got ALL over me! She only got a drop by her eye, I got it all over my hair and face and glasses and shirt and arm AND it splattered up onto the open hatch of the car! We just laughed- I wouldn’t have cared so much except I liked that pink shirt! Thankfully I had a shirt to change into- and thankfully it came out after a couple of washings!

This photo doesn't even do justice with how much mustard was on me!

Laura was cute too:

 

It was a fun day and neat to see everything together as a family.

Stay tuned for Yosemite: Day 2!