Yosemite Day One

Day one of our Yosemite trip was basically a lot of prep and driving. We'd read that the black bears in Yosemite are liable to break into your car, eat your food and take it for a joyride if you so much as leave a oyster cracker in the ashtray, so part of the morning was spent de-fooding the car. Needless to say, the back seat really needed it...I'm still trying to find out how the kids got so much stuff under their carseats.

We finally got in motion around 10am, and things went relatively smoothly until around lunchtime. About a half hour prior Megan had asked us a seemingly hypothetical question about what we would do if she was carsick. She emphatically denied she actually was feeling sick, but as we rolled through Modesto that proved to be incorrect. After cleaning up in a fire station parking lot and grabbing some lunch, we continued on our way.

We finally reached the outskirts of Yosemite around 3, following route 140 as it wound through an increasingly deep valley. A short ways in we hit a random traffic light in front of a bridge crossing the Merced river, with a sign stating "expect 15 minute wait". This seemed odd, as there was no one on the other side - what were we waiting for? About 10 minutes later the light changed, and we learned that the road on the other side was just a single lane, so the light was needed to accommodate two-way traffic, one way at a time. The crossing turned out to be an emergency diversion, because the original road had been wiped out by a 600 foot-wide landslide in 2006, which has since been named the Ferguson Rock Slide.

We reached Yosemite Valley around 4. There were huge granite cliffs on both sides, making for some impressive scenery. El Capitan dominates the first section of the valley. It's a 3000 foot hunk of rock, the tallest unbroken cliff in the world, so stopped to take some pictures. The kids also got to see their first waterfall, Bridal Veil Falls.

The sun was rapidly going down, so we mushed on to Camp Curry, where we'd be staying the night. After checking in (where we saw more cool videos of bears breaking into cars), the next order of business was dinner. I'd been lead to believe that basically all there was to eat at the camp was hot dogs and pizza. We lucked out, however, that there was a buffet-style fundraiser going on that night, where we were all able to get a great dinner. The kids scored some hot chocolate and I had two pieces of pie.

Now stuffed, our last task was to figure out where we were sleeping. Camp Curry really is like a campsite - a whole bunch of tent-like cabins on the valley floor. It was quite dark out by that point, and we didn't really know where we were going, but after some fumbling about we did find our spot. The web site describes the cabins as "wood-framed canvas-covered tents on a raised wooden platform". We had splurged a bit and gotten one with a heater, but I still wasn't expecting much. As it turned out, however, it was actually pretty nice. The outside was canvas, but there were real walls and three cots inside, and once the heater was going it was comfortable. We packed up everything with a scent into the bear locker outside the door, and hit the hay.

Here are some pictures: