Yosemite Day!

My day started off with a fine breakfast and one assumption that I am a lesbian.  What was that?  Apparently single girls just do not do Yosemite alone.  Says the server at breakfast: “And are you dining alone or will your…partner be joining you?”  Alone, thank you very much for pointing it out.   I may have been in a camo thermal but that is just no excuse.

There is this amazing place you pass just outside Yosemite called the Rim of the World.  It is almost better than Yosemite and photos do not do it justice, though I will include one anyway. 

Yosemite itself was pretty spectacular.  Just inside Yosemite there is still snow on the ground.  Yosemite Valley is about 26 miles from the west entrance.  The first 10 miles are driving through well plowed winter.  Once the drifts abate you go through a series of tunnels and when they have spit you out, there are waterfalls.  I don’t know about you readers, but I have always had a thing for waterfalls.  So I felt the need to climb down beside one.  Cascade Creek is where one waterfall turns into a set of rapids.  It meets either another creek or another waterfall’s runoff, either way it’s amazing.  This is of course where I choose to make my first hike/scramble of the day.

For the next  4 hours I proceeded to stop every ½ mile and look around playing amateur photographer.  I have a strictly enforced “Less than 1 mile” hike criteria.  No matter how tempting the end product sounds I do not undergo any hike listed on placard or announced by shuttle bus driver as longer than 1 mile.  Bodies as scrumptious as mine are not honed by a fitness regime that would allow strenuous hiking.  They are the glorious end product of French fries and random low impact stunt work.  Trapeze, sky diving, zip lines.  One day the National Park Service will catch on.

Much more time was spent at the park once I made it to the Valley and started taking the shuttles, but other than a few deer and bird sightings it was much the same.  Spectacular view, ooohhhh, waterfall, ahhhh, German tourist not getting tram driver’s joke, hee hee funny tourist. 

Discoveries of the Day:

1)      The water in Yosemite is FREEZING.  It is melted snow.  This makes perfect sense.

2)      When standing near a waterfall you will get wet.  And cold.  From the water.  Again with the sense.

3)      One should put on sunscreen more than once a day when playing outside.  Stupid sense.  I am still less sunburned than you though Chris.

And here is how I finished my day – a very large coke at the bar of the oldest liquor serving establishment in the state of California.  Of course that is a place of historical significance that I would find.

Until tomorrow…

Fairly self-explanatory, though not terribly flattering.

Vista Point, Rim of the World, Stanislaus National Forest

Amy Shoes-Corrado, this photo is for you.

and this one too.