Yosemite - The Most Popular Park

Saturday, June 11th - Yosemite National Park – South to East Entrance, California - Day 120

After a late driving night and no need to get anywhere specific until 4pm, we leisurely got ready and packed up. We decided to try to get into the park but were unsuccessful. A laundromat fifteen minutes away let us get to the bottom of our pile of laundry. Things went long and we had to race to get into the park and to the visitor centre before it closed. We had to forget about hooking up the trailer on our way by. Our race was won, we had two minutes in the visitor centre to get badges, stamps, advice, and booklets. While the girls and John hung out at the visitor centre and nearby lodge, I drove back to pick up the trailer.

When I picked up everyone, they looked cleaner for some reason but regardless, onwards we went. Yosemite National Park is known for the Yosemite Valley, a beautiful river valley nestled in between high cliffs of granite that are a favourite of climbers from the world over. We had an hour of driving through forested mountains to get to the valley. The valley is framed by several famous rock faces: El Capitan, Sentinel Rock and Half Dome that are frequented by climbers.

There is a big loop road through Yosemite Valley. We drove along casually stopping at pull offs to take pictures of the river and meadows framed by cliffs on all sides. There was a great deal of excitement, with vehicles stopped on the road, to see a pair of brown black bears (yes, black bears can be brown).

To be continued...

Comments

First Day of Online School

Tuesday, February 22nd – Grayton Beach, Florida – Day 15 We signed the girls up for online schooling and today was the first day. They were on their laptops at the crack of 9am EST (8am CST which is where we were). We have decided to have them attend class for an hour a day from 9-10am and see how it goes. It provides a bit of structure and we were tired of not yelling at them to stare at a screen. Kidding. I don’t know how it’ll work out. If it doesn’t, we will pull them from school and they will be officially home schooled. Mary decided she was left out when she lost the opportunity to see the Goodwill so Gen and her went off to the store while I took the kids to the beach. We had a pretty good time. I’m not the biggest of beach fans but I have to get use to it because we are in Florida and everywhere is beach. We kicked around the soccer ball, hit around the baseball, the kids collected shells and played in a tidal pool near the beach. The surf was up so the k...

Sand Sledding on White Dunes - More Photos

Meow Wolf and O

Wednesday, May 25th –Lake Mead National Recreation Area to Las Vegas, Nevada – Day 104 We woke up in our roadside turn out and got ready for the day. Our plan was to go for a swim at Lake Mead, see the Hoover Dam and head back into Vegas. The morning was stifling hot, we were looking forward to the swim. We drove to the visitor centre at Lake Mead Recreation Centre. We could see Lake Mead on the way. The water was well below the high-water line on the rocks. At the visitor centre we got our passport stamped, filled our water bottles, and received junior ranger booklets. The air conditioning was so nice we set up the kids to work on their booklets and hung around. The kids finished up enough activities that they were sworn in by a very nice ranger before we left. We decided to go see the Hoover Dam first. We dropped the trailer in the parking lot. We heard it might need to be opened at the security checkpoint and we couldn’t be bothered. The H...

Simnett Travels

Search This Blog