…Not really, but for awhile that’s how Tara thought it was pronounced.
We woke up the next day having been treated to an onslaught of fantastic natural wine the night before, although, as Alex had promised… no hangover. Why, natural wine, no additives. Perfect, it’s only that we’re exhausted because we were up all night. Tara and I said goodbye to our San Fransisco hosts, loaded the Shasta and began our trek to Yosemite. We didn’t make it far before our stop at the Berkley REI, Wholefoods, and then we stopped at Berkley Bagels for breakfast sandwiches. This was a bizarre stop. The sandwich place ran like a Chinese restaurant… we ordered and really weren’t sure what we were getting but we were starving. To our surprise the sandwiches were fantastic. Tara, unknowingly ordered an open faced ham and cheese, which she’ll be talking about for weeks, and my breakfast sandwich was great.
Ok, enough about sandwiches, we’re on the road to Yosemite National Park… we’ve heard great things. It’s 75 degrees, the sun is shining… it’s a beautiful day to drive to a beautiful park. We left Berkley, and headed east. Once we were out of the bay area and in more of the valley area the temperature jumped from 75 to 101 degrees. No joke, crazy person hot for no good reason.
The drive started to wear on us. It’s about 3.5 – 4 hours of driving. We hadn’t really rushed out of San Fran, so we were expecting to get to Yosemite around 3:30pm. I know that’s a lot later than our usual site stalking arrival time of 6:30am, but it’s getting to be later in the season, kids are back in school, and it’s past peak season.
0 for 3 on that one. We got to Yosemite and there were… probably 30 cars at the entrance we were going through and they all stopped immediately at the visitor center/camping reservations to see about camping. Yosemite allows a lot more reservations than other parked we’ve been to, so when we arrived we realized that there are 13 campgrounds in Yosemite and they all allow reservations. Out of the 13 campgrounds I was told that was one…. ONE, that MIGHT have a spot open for a camper and it’s basically 40 miles north of everything you want to see in Yosemite. Not like 40 highway miles, 40 windy rough, 35 MPH miles. So, we cut our loses and drove out of the park and spent the night at Sweetwater campground. We’re told that Sweetwater was a beautiful campground… before the fire. We’re sitting in the middle of what looked like a logging lot. just felled trees everywhere. Oh, and a sign that said “Caution Snakes” again with a picture of a rattlesnake. Cool, I’ll just watch for rattle snakes under the millions of failed pine needles and random brush piles… or I’ll just stay in the camper. So, we were working though our slightly unfortunate situation (it was about 85 degrees… and there was no breeze, despite the lack of trees.
But, we kept our heads up, and thought, tomorrow’s another day and we’re still heading into one of the most beautiful parks in the country… and then it started. The little old man who we had passed at the entrance to the campground was apparently the camp host and around 8pm he had worked himself into such an impressive drunkenness, that he started to sing at his campfire. For the next two hours, the camp host drunkenly sang 3 to 4 lines of varying country songs… incorrectly… as if they were all the same song, with long pauses between verses. It went something like this:
… these boots still got a lot of ground,
not covered yet… at least
another million miles………….
(60 second pause)
… You don’t know her like I do
She’s the only one who can…
(45 second pause)
… Down, down, down… to a burnin’ ring of fire
round round round, flames are going higher…
She burns….
It was awesome, horrible, funny as hell, annoying… just a rollercoaster of emotion pouring out of our poor old camp host… the majority of the songs were about a woman… leaving. So… that was a bit of a downer, but at least his voice was horrible.
The next morning, believe it or not… camp host was wide awake, fire going… just getting ready to clean the poop rooms. I couldn’t believe it. Anyways, Tara and I head into the park at 8:30am and stop again to ask about a campsite, We’re told that the same place a bazillion miles from anywhere might have a spot, or, we could head down into Yosemite Valley (which is where all the sites and trails are) to put our names on a waiting list. Kind of down, we made the trip to the valley to check it out. We thought, what are the chances that someone doesn’t show up for their reservation… so we didn’t think much about it and stopped to take some pictures and really weren’t in a rush. Oh, before I forget, the reason that the park is so full despite it being later in the year, kids being in school, and it being such a big park… apparently the majority of Eastern Europe was on vacation that week, and they were at Yosemite. Tara and I were in a minority of english speaking guests at the park. Ok, so we finally make our way down to the valley area and after a while of driving around, Tara says “Do you want to just pull in to one of these campgrounds and see if they have any cancelations?” So we do, and the guy at the entrance (after a million questions about our camper) tells us that yesterday there were probably 20-25 sites that people didn’t show up for. We couldn’t believe it. So we shot straight over to the Campground Registration building and put our name on the list, Number 26. Ugh, if we had only taken the first woman’s word for it we’d probably be 6.. may 10… but we’d be up there. Oh well, we have to be back at 3pm when they read the names off of the people who get a spot. This is has become the type of “obstacle” or “problem” we encounter now… trying to get our names on a list for a place to sleep. Who would have thought finding a camp site would be this tough… don’t these people work?
We had few hours to kill so Tara and I rented bikes and had thought the valley floor loop. We didn’t make if very far because… well, because I wasn’t in a rush and was taking a million pictures and videos. (none of them came out good but oh well) It was a great time though, renting bikes was a great way to get around a bit faster and see some of the sites. We stopped at a visitor center which had some great displays, and road through Yosemite village.
We had Murphy chilling in the camper back at Half Dome Village so we headed back. We had enough time to stop and get a beer and a pizza for lunch before the big name reveal. While we were eating, we realized that eastern europeans think that squirrels and chipmunks are cute and not just rodents with diseases… so they feed them. They feed them a lot. So much so that even with Murphy sitting under our table Tara and I could see 3 or 4 squirrels debating whether it was worth making an attempt at our “za”… 2:50pm, we better head over.
We got to the registration building and immediately realized two things, one: the wait list… is a thing, and two: 26, wasn’t that bad. There had to be 50 people waiting around… at least.
At exactly 3pm a ranger walked out of the building and into the sea of weary travelers just looking for a place to park their ass for one night. (That was the other thing, if you get called, you only have the spot for one night, and you’d have to do this again tomorrow) The ranger first read all the rules so that everyone could hear and so that no matter who got called, everyone heard the same rules. She was holding a lot of tags. She began to read through the list and one by one, people came up to get their tag… every once in a while there was a glimmer of hope when she read a name and no one came forward… perfect, on to the next name. In the end, she had 18 tags, there were 4 no shows, and we were 26. If you’re not goo at math… we missed by 4 spots. Quite dejected, again, we headed out of the park to spend the night. This time we didn’t make the long drive back to Sweetwater… there’s only so much bad, incorrect, sad, drunken country you can take. We headed out the south entrance and passed 3 campgrounds, all with large FULL signs at the entrances. Also, as difficult to believe as it may be, there were no Walmart’s anywhere remotely close. So, Tara and I did the only thing we could think of, we pulled off of the road at a random turnout area, and just parked for the night… on the side of the road. But on the plus side, we stopped to take in some pretty nice views.
The next morning, (Tara was hell bent on a hike is Yosemite) we woke up and the drive back into Yosemite to hike Sentinel Dome. The Sentinel Dome hike is only 2.2 miles round trip, but to get to the trail head you have to drive up 16 miles of Glacier Point road. Making this drive with the camper in tow was no easy task… and again, the sides of the road were just drop offs to your certain death. Anyway, we made it to the trail head and managed to work the truck and camper into what actually looked like a parking spot (although it wasn’t). The hike was great… pretty easy/beginner for the majority, then you reach the dome, and it’s a rock face that seems to go straight up… and as you try to hike up… it just keeps going. Tara read that this peak offers views that are only beat buy the views from Half Dome (huge hiking attraction here). They were right, we got some great pictures and stood on what felt like the top of the world. There was nothing we were looking up to… everything seemed to be down. I explained to Tara that it explains all my heavy breathing on the hike… the elevation.
We also found out that while we were hiking, we had a new niece waiting for us at home.
Before I end the post, I don’t want to make Yosemite seem like a park that isn’t worth going to… it is. It’s beautiful. What I will say is that Yosemite isn’t a park that was conducive to our situation. We’re road tripping across the country so we don’t have definitive dates for our stops. We also have Murphy with us, so we can’t leave for long periods of time. Tara and I would have loved to do the Half Dome hike, but it’s estimated at 12 to 14 hours. We would never leave Murphy on his own for that long. Also, we found out that in order to hike the “cables” which is the very end of the trail to the top of the actual half done, you need a permit… and the permit had to be applied for two days prior to the hike… So like I said, it was just not really conducive to our situation. Plus, as I mentioned earlier, all of eastern Europe was on vacation at the same time… in Yosemite. So, don’t take this blog as a reason to skip Yosemite, you just need to plan it out far in advance, and make reservations.
But the train must keep moving, so on to Sequoia & Kings Canyon.
withoutwhatifs 