Yosemite!

We were driving too fast every time we passed the signs for the parks, so I made Bryce turn around multiple times to make sure we got a picture in front of each sign. We got all 3 pictures in one day.





As we drove to Yosemite from Kings, we were speculating:

1. There will be tons more people in Yosemite.
2. We will probably like Kings better since it was less crowded and maybe less frills.
3. Will we get a campsite for tomorrow????
4. Is it really as great as people say it is?
5. How different will it be than what we've already seen?

When we drove into Yosemite, we drove directly to the visitor center then to the Valley just to check it out. We were able to see Half Dome and El Capitan just in the first few hours of arriving. These granite monoliths are awesome. No wonder so many people come to see them!



A lot of our thoughts were confirmed/answered. There WERE tons of people there (and traffic throughout the park). It wasn't better than Kings, just different. So many parts of Yosemite are like images out of a magazine. It is BEAUTIFUL. In the Valley, there are amazing green meadows with wild flowers, and then giant granite faces thousands of feet higher jutting out on every side of the valley. We were taking hundreds of pictures just in the first day.





When doing the research on all the parks, we were really overwhelmed with all the hikes there were and things to see. It was hard figuring out when and what we were going to do with our time there. As far as Yosemite goes, we found a great website that helped us decide which ones to do. Yosemite Hikes gives 'tips that the official sites are too polite to reveal.' After reading through his site, we decided to do the Half Dome hike for a day, and for another day, we would try to do (as many as we could of) his "Yosemite's 10 best easy hikes" to maximize scenery per footstep.

That night, we stayed in a cute little town 45 minutes outside of the park called Mariposa. (Everything takes at least 45 minutes to get to from the park since all the roads are winding around mountains and streams and forests.) We knew we wouldn't get a campsite when we arrived, since it was already lunch time (almost all of the first-come-first-serve campsites fill up by noon in Yosemite during the summer.)



Apparently it's been there for ages, because the day before we left, we were talking to my Uncle David and he said he stayed at the Mariposa Lodge in the 70s!!