YOSEMITE: Welcome to Curry Village

Not quite recovered from our enormous gambling losses in Reno, we got in the car and headed onward to California! Neither of us had ever been to the USA's most populous (and most broke) state, so we were excited to see new territory.

Welcome to California!
This is the view just after crossing the state line where we had to go through a check-in station for our produce and get ridiculed for pronouncing Nevada as "Nev-AH-da."

Taken by Mono Lake
...which is a lake that got sick after kissing another lake and has been on bed rest ever since

My mom told me the drive into Yosemite would be beautiful, but things are very different now you see...uh huh.

 We took the Northeast entrance into Yosemite, which is a beautiful scenic highway where locals get very mad if you don't go fast enough when in front of them. It was raining when we arrived in the park, so we didn't get out for our typical "Can you tell we're tourists?" picture by the park sign. Instead, I just asked Court to get a picture of the sign as we were driving by...

Early Ansel Adams
(Yosemite National.......WHAT?)

Little Miss Awesome Sauce behind the camera

 Our first stop in the park was in Toulumne Meadows, which as you can imagine is a scenic meadow surrounded by mountains at about 9000 feet elevation. It was a very pretty place, so we stopped and hiked around a bit to see the sights and for Court to spot aminals.

The sign

A deer's buttocks

This picture doesn't do justice to how tall this cliff was...and you could basically walk right up it...if  you were Lance Armstrong.

 From the Meadows we continued on the entrance road down to the Yosemite Valley floor, which is the MOST BEAUTIFUL place I have ever been in my life without question. If you have never been it is hard to describe how staggering the scenery is. The valley is completely surrounded by these sheer cliff faces that go up several thousand feet.

Check out those cliffs behind my fat head.

View from valley floor...doesn't do justice.

 Yosemite is also the most expensive place that we have stayed on our trip. We payed $120 a night to stay in a tent cabin! (see below) As it turns out, it was well worth it. Curry Village (where our tent was located) is an amazing place. There are hundreds of cabins and tons of families of tourists and people who have been coming to Yosemite their entire lives. It's like its own little tent city in the middle of the woods.

It's like being back at camp--except at this camp you get woken up every morning just before 6am by people scaring black bears away from their tents! (Pretty cool.)

See how excited she is!
(OK, so Courtney did not seem initially to be quite so excited about the whole tent cabin/communal showers/bear locker thing, but after the first night she was groovin it big time.)

This makes the cabin look much larger than it actually was.

 We went on a little hike and bike ride our first day just to see the park. Below is a picture of the hike that we took the next day to Upper Yosemite falls. It was quite a trek. More on that later! Thanks for checkin' in.

Upper and Lower Yosemite Falls as seen from the Valley floor