Week 25 - Yosemite National Park (Grizzly Bear)

Hello Family and Friends,

Yosemite is another one of those national parks that is entirely too big. We were staying about 45 minutes outside of the park. We had two goals: to see Yosemite valley and to see the Sequoia trees. We only accomplished one. We drove two and a half hours to Yosemite valley, which offers a lot. We could have spent all of our time just in the valley. It is the most developed visitor area of any park we have seen. It has a major lodge, camping, multiple restaurants that are open late, a visitor shop and a outdoors shop. All of it is connected by a system of free shuttles that run throughout. That outdoor shop was needed because one thing that is striking about Yosemite is the rock faces. There were offerings for rock climbing lessons right there in the valley. There were also some really great places to do some biking without too much car traffic. However, we have not yet replaced our bikes and were disappointingly not able to take advantage of biking. However, in the valley, the bus system allows you to park and then there are 16 different stops offering everything from hiking to tubing. We decided to see the famous Yosemite Fall.

We brought Bruce with us to Yosemite Falls

The next day we were considering going 3 hours to get to the Sequoia trees, but we just couldn't convince ourselves to drive the same winding road back to see the Sequoias. Instead, we took advantage of the great outdoor pool at the hotel.

The view from our hotel balcony

We definitely needed more time in Yosemite! And we definitely needed to stay inside the park so that we have better access to the sites. We may just have to figure out this camping thing if we're going to be serious about visiting natural parks.