Yosemite Dan

My brother Dan is going back home soon for a job in Plymouth. I will miss him a lot, and at first I was a teeny bit jealous, but as he tries desperately to cram in seeing as much as he possibly can in the two months he now has left, it has made me realise, again, how very lucky we are to be here.

As part of his efforts to see more of the country, he planned a road trip to Yosemite National Park last weekend and he asked us if we wanted to come along. No sooner had he asked, we were sitting in the car and driving over the Bay Bridge and out of San Francisco. We stayed in an old California Gold Rush mining town called Mariposa, an hour away from Yosemite. It was a tiny cowboy type place that took no longer than an hour to explore, which was lucky really as it was boiling hot, and we had plans to get up with the sun the next morning to get to Yosemite early.

It seemed that the sun had insomnia, as when we got up at 5.30am, it was already alive and kicking. In fact, at 6pm later that day it was still 33 degrees C, and reached 36 degrees on Sunday. Too hot to sleep, and certainly too hot to hire bikes without gears, and travel around Yosemite Valley. It was fun though, until goodness knows how many miles later, my bike muscles, stiff from a fourteen year hiatus, said no more please and refused to work. I sat my jelly legs down, mindful of my saddle sore and drank my own body weight in water reserving some to pour on my head like a real athlete. The park was now filling up quickly and as we had been there six hours already decided we should start heading off.

The next stop for the evening was Sonora, another old mining town, but with a lot more going on. We ate barbecued meat and cold beer for dinner and felt like rather full and very happy cowboys and girl. The hotel was full of motorcyclists and had an antique style wire cage lift which you had to propel yourself out of quickly lest it set off again, and the staff didn't seem to mind that three people were staying in a room booked, and possibly suitable only for one. Either they had seen much worse, they didn't care, or were too hot to care. The antique air conditioning wasn't as fun as the lift and kept us awake most of the evening, so the plan to get up really early again to see another part of the park wasn't quite realised.

We arrived a little later than planned at Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, a granite walled valley flooded in 1923 to create a water supply for San Francisco, following the 1906 earthquake. Incredibly, this reservoir is still the place that we get our water from today, a staggering 156 miles away. As well as being so useful (we had already drank 2 liters each of it's bounty), it was beautiful, peaceful compared to the valley which gets most of the tourists (largely due to the fact that Hetch Hetchy has no facilities) and just a pleasant place to be on a Sunday afternoon. We strolled across the bridge at O'Shaughnessy Dam and through the rock tunnel until we felt lethargic with heat, and decided it was probably time to head off home.

(Dan took a lot of photos and some of them can be seen here and here)

The journey back seemed to take forever and we fell foul of the usual US lack of signs and almost ended up in Los Angeles. Over tired and over heating, we had still managed to see a lot of the park, and certainly more than we saw last time we were there and staying slap bang in the middle of it; plus we got to see some real American small towns, the like of which are difficult to describe, or certainly to do justice and which just do not exist in the UK. All of this was possible in a weekend and if that doesn't make me one of the luckiest people alive, I don't know what does.