Pride Weekend

I've done a full post on Pride weekend over here. Here is another picture from the night, and a bit of street art.



Yosemite

Yes I know, I've been back a week and only now blogging, extreme tiredness and dead laptop are my excuses. I have now again uploaded all the photo's, this time to my external, and with the aid of a borrowed laptop can finally attempt to write.

I'm bypassing Pride weekend as I'm writing that one for Gaynz, if bloody buggery Wordpress ever decides to play nicely, so now it's Yosemite. We headed out there on the Monday after the mayhem and partying of Pride. NZAlien loaned us one of those GPS thingies to direct us. We started of by calling it Gertrude, but by day two she was referred to as "the yelling lady", and we figured out how to shut her up.

We drove from San Francisco to Mariposa that day with no great drama other than popping eyeballs in a mall car park. It had been quite cold in SF but an hour inland it was searingly hot, so when we stopped for food we also changed clothes, much to the amusement of those in the cars around us. We managed to get what was probably the last motel room in town and promptly jumped in the pool until the room was ready. Tuesday we were up early and off to Yosemite, a good move as the place ended up getting crowded. When we left in the afternoon we got stuck in a traffic jam trying to get out of the park and it took 1.5 hours to get out.

As we started to get closer to the park the scenery started to get spectacular and the river was like Huka Falls on steroids. Once in the park the first sight was the little tunnel to drive through.

Then the many spectacular sights started to appear. The photo's just don't do justice to immense size of the granite rock faces, they are breathtaking.

I totally lost track of how many waterfalls there are and how many we saw.

We of course had hopes of seeing bears, and NZAlien had seen some on her visit. Oso is one well travelled bear but doesn't look to keen at the prospect of meeting others.

We saw lots of these, both here and in other places on our journey.

You can imagine my glee at seeing a large group of these on the first trail, all in matching outfits.



We spent several hours walking up one of the trails and along the way got to see one face of the Dome. People climb this. They must be mad.

This of course is just a wee sample of our days hiking, a day of stunning scenery. We then drove 4 hours down a remote road to the coast again with a different type of vast scenery.

I was driving at this point, weird, very weird. We spent that night at a place called Pismo Beach which had it's own unique scenery, but that story is for another day as it's bed time for me now.