It’s always hard to sleep in a strange place and last night was no different. Being that very few of the rooms in the hotel have their own bathroom, people walked by our room all night long on their way to use the communal facilities. It’s not the most ideal situation, not having a bathroom in our room, but it’s also not worth an extra $100 a night. (Trust me, I had a serious debate with myself at 3:00am this morning about this very topic!) You could have convinced me to spend the extra money at that time.
After sleeping in (7:00am), we ate breakfast in the hotel dining room and headed down hwy 41 into Yosemite Valley. It’s about a 30 mile drive, on a 30 mile an hour road, littered with road construction the entire way. It took about an hour and a half. Not much to see the first part of the drive, but about 20 miles into it, you go through a semi-long tunnel and when you come out the other side, El Capitan and the Yosemite Valley is starring you right in the face. We pulled over to take some snapshots of the valley. We also used our binoculars to spot a few people making the ascent up the side of the El Capitan.
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| Standing in front of the Yosemite Valley view. El Capitan is directly behind us and Half Dome in about the center of the picture in the background. |
We stopped off at Bridalveil Falls and hiked the short distance to see the almost dried up falls. This is not the best time of the year to see waterfalls. Spring would be a much better choice if that is what you are interested in.
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| Scott heading up the trail. |
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| There is still a small amount of water running over the falls. |
Soon Half Dome came into view. It’s been a bit hazy here today, but the scenery is still magnificent. I caught myself on several occasions stopping to look up. In the valley you are surrounded by trees and buildings, but then you look up and these giant mountains stand above everything else. I can’t explain it very well. You find yourself looking down at where you are walking, or looking eye level at the other people and buildings around you, and then you look up and you are amazed that the mountains are here and you forgot about them.
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| Scott stamping his National Park Passport. |
Our big adventure for the day was to participate in a walking tour called “Walking in the Footsteps of Ansel Adams”. The Ansel Adams photography gallery is located at Yosemite and they do these tours where they take you around the valley and show you pictures that Ansel Adams took and then help you to use your own camera to take the same photo. There were six people in our group and we learned a lot about photography during the four hour class.
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| Everyone in class trying to act like they have a clue what the instructor is talking about! |
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| My photo of Half Dome from the meadow. |
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| Scott's photo of Half Dome with the reflection in the river. |
After the class, we ate dinner at the Yosemite Lodge and then headed back to our hotel in Wawona. I am typing this as we are sitting in road construction. We are three cars back from the flagger and he said it would be 30 minutes when he stopped us. Good thing we ate before we headed back to our hotel.
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| Welcome to road construction in the National Park |
Animals seen so far: deer 3, squirrels 1, bears 0.
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