Year 2 - Day 211 - July 31

It's hard to see here, but the license plate of that (old-ish) car in front of me is "NiewCar." Maybe funny at one point, but when the paint around it is peeling, it isn't new anymore. ;)

Year 2 - Day 210 - July 30

We finally used our oven today...to make cut up roasted potatoes (from our crop share) with our fancy garlic olive oil from CA.

Year 2 - Day 209 - July 29

I'll blog more in depth about this book for my official book blog, but I realized it hadn't been a picture of the day here yet because of all my vacation pictures. I read this book on the plane on the way to CA and then finished it up over the first couple evenings. It is fantastic. The author has a knack for writing non-fiction in an easy to read narrative style. The story is about an olympic runner from the 30's who is then in WWII. I'm so glad that the author had extensive footnotes and endnotes, because my reaction to reading it was similar to "Million Little Pieces" and we all know how that wound up... I'd put this book up in the top 5 I've read in as long as I can remember.

Something little that doesn't have a ton to do with the overall plot ... I never thought about how Olympians got to the games before planes. There's a small interesting section about that that for some reason has really stuck in my brain.

Year 2 - Day 208 - July 28

After getting home at 3am and sleeping until almost lunch time, we forced ourselves to get up and attempt to get on a schedule. It's crop share day!! Mike was excited to see an eggplant, and created some fried eggplant for his pasta at dinner, while I went with the regular meatballs.

Year 2 - Day 207 - July 27

Today was soooooo long. We spent our morning attempting to hunt down a bottle of Pliney The Elder to bring home for Jeff. We went to the brewery website & found the distributer, and then followed the list down El Camino Real stopping in the stores on the list. Everyone was out. Eventually a friendly guy at Whole Foods explained that their shipments last less than a day. Sadly, we did see a bottle in a convenience store in the city over a week ago, but we didn't want it to ride around in the hot car all week. If we had known it would be the only bottle we'd see, we would have taken the risk!

We had lunch at Go Bistro in Terminal 1 of SFO. Neither of us was expecting much, since we were in an airport, but we both really liked our meal. How often does that happen? I had some kind of rice and pork bowl and he had the most disgusting looking eel sandwich ever. But he said it was great. I think eel is pretty gross looking to start with, but at least in sushi it's in small pieces. His sandwich was long and skinny with giant slices of eel. EW.

Our first flight from SFO to PHX was uneventful, but had some cool scenery. As soon as they let us use electronics, I got a shot of the city disappearing ...

And then we flew right over Stanford ...

And finally over Moffet Air Field/Base/whatever, home of the coolest looking hangars ever. (I'm told they are for blimps.)

Google's complex is in there too, next to the airfield, but I only know that because I have looked at it in map form. :)

Our 2nd flight from PHX-BWI had wifi! It was my first time having wifi on a plane, and I loved it. I used the map to watch where we were the whole time. I'm a dork, I know. But it made the time go by quickly!

Year 2 - Day 206 - July 26

We spent much of today in Palo Alto visiting my brother on and near the Stanford Campus. (Did you know Mike Mussina went to Stanford? Just saying.) The first thing we did was meet him at Slider Bar Cafe on University Ave. I love that the world is adding pulled pork sliders to their menus, because I love pulled pork ever so much more than burgers. Plus their decorations reminded me of Trivial Pursuit. After lunch it was time for the beer we'd been sent to the west coast to locate, Pliney the Elder.

Mike said it was good, but since hard core IPAs aren't his thing it wasn't mindblowing. To finish our afternoon, we meandered all over campus. There happens to be a ladies tennis tournament going on this week, and we found Serena Williams practicing under the watchful eye of her dad.

I really liked Stanford's campus, it reminded me a lot of my first college in the desert. For dinner tonight we went to Calafia which is proud to claim Google's chef as their own. (Google has a chef?!?)

Year 2 - Day 205 - July 25

It's been hard every day of this driving portion of our vacation to guess how long a trip is going to take, because unlike driving on 95 at home, here miles rarely corresponds to minutes. In Sequoia & Kings Canyon, we were rarely going over 25 mph and often much slower. When you add in all the stops along the way to take pictures of the views, stretch our legs, and run away from reptiles, what appears on a map to be an hour drive turns into four or five. 

Yesterday we found that Yosemite is easier to drive in because the climbs are gradual and through mostly forest rather than being carved into the mountain side. (This is causing a chicken & egg conversation ... do more people go to Yosemite because the roads are more accessible, or did they make the roads more accessible because more people come here? I tend to think the first.) This morning we came across a semi-recently burned section of forest.

News to note: they're not called "controlled burns" anymore because firefighters agree that you can't control fires. They're called "prescribed fires" now. These areas of the forest usually have a fire every 5-15 years, so if it's been more than that the area gets studied to see if a fire would make sense. Crazy, huh? Once we were up at the higher altitudes, evidence of the late snow started showing up.

That's forest-dirt-covered snow I'm standing on! In fact, many of the higher elevation campgrounds still aren't open. The road we took to the meadows wasn't open even a few weeks ago! Talk about a short summer time. One of the scenic viewpoints we stopped at was manned by volunteers that had a telescope pointed at half dome. It was really neat to look through and see the people doing the last section of the climb on the cables. (The route was visible today because we were looking at the mountain from the other direction.) The camera's zoom lens got close, but not close enough to watch the people like we did through the telescope.

(Although if you use photoshop to zoom in, you can see the line of people looking like ants!)

After awhile, we came across possibly my favorite spot of the whole nature-oriented portion of our trip, Tenaya Lake.

I really wished I had packed a swimsuit for the day, because I wanted to go in so badly! Much of the water in Yosemite is too dangerous to get near, but this lake is a popular relatively safe spot for things like swimming and kayaking. Near the lake, we spent a long time watching a group of accomplished mountain climbers climb a mountain. It was really fun to watch, especially the guy who appeared to be part mountain goat!

Finally, at almost the end of the park, we came to Tuolumme Meadows.

I'm thinking the huge amounts of cars & people scared all the wildlife away. We got one last distance shot on our way out of the park.

After our hours spent crisscrossing the park, we relaxed before deciding to hunt down a town with food. Even though our hotel here is nicer than the one in Three Rivers, there is nothing around except the hotel's restaurant. Near our hotel in El Portal is a GIGANTIC rockslide in the river valley. It's so big that they've constructed bridges to route the road to the other side of the river as a detour. There was only room for one lane on the other side of the river, however, so there's another traffic light like there was in Sequoia. Shortly after we went through the detour this afternoon, we were stopped by a traffic jam. Earlier, there was a bad car accident. With the one way roads & traffic lights & people getting off work at the warehouse, the large amount of cars made it difficult for the rescue workers to get to the accident scene. Many of us stood around outside our cars for over an hour, while a few rangers on their way home from work directed traffic & ambulances arrived to take the victims to the helicopters. The hospitals are so far away that helicopter evacuations are common. All I could think about (courtesy of Trauma shows on Discovery TV) was that "golden hour" where medical attention greatly increases peoples chances of being ok. Since we were in a canyon with no cell service, the traffic jam didn't happen until a whole half hour after the accident, and the ambulances didn't get there until at least an hour and 15 minutes had gone by. They weren't in the helicopters yet when they let the cars go, and it had been more than an hour & a half. It was pretty scary, especially when we saw the cars. After coming up and out of the canyon, we eventually happened upon the town of Mariposa. We had dinner at a local Chinese place (Mine was surprisingly amazing, Mike didn't really like his) and then amazing ice cream sundaes at Happy Burger, the cutest little burger joint on earth.

Year 2 - Day 204 - July 24

We hit the road early this morning and drove to Yosemite. So far, it has had a lot more in common with Disney World than I was expecting. First of all, it's FULL of people. We had to wait in line for more than 30 minutes just to pay to get through the gate. Yowza! There are no parking spaces anywhere, and very little wildlife because there are people everywhere. It's really pretty, though. And it's much more accessible than the last two parks. We haven't been on roads hanging off mountains too often, at least for the places we went today.

We started with a journey up to Glacier Point to look down at the waterfalls and valley.

The waterfalls are amazing. They had a late snow here this year, so much snow that they had to evacuate the people staying in the park. All that snow is now melting and making great rivers & waterfalls. The other great view from Glacier Point is of Half Dome.

Using our zoom lens as binoculars, we could see a few people up on top. They recently started issuing permits to climb Half Dome, because of the huge crowds. It's several miles from the bottom (in the woods) to the top of the mountain, and you have to do it with a person right behind you and a person right in front of you the whole time. That's how crazy it was. Now they only let 450 people do it a day. I imagine that's still pretty busy. The last section is up a rock face with cables. I don't know how they do it, since people are going up and coming down at the same time. Not interested!!!!!

Then we headed down to the valley to look up at waterfalls! They don't look that big in the pictures, until you spot a tiny person for perspective.

We had a great dinner at the Mountain Room Restaurant. It was expensive (More Disney World qualities - pay to get in, pay through the nose for everything inside) but tasty. And you couldn't beat the view! (The water fall is in that window, but my phone's camera didn't do it justice.

It felt funny to eat in such a nice dining room in the same clothes we wore to run around in the woods today, but the information desk & host at the restaurant assured us we were fine, and were surrounded by others in the same attire. Many people wait for reservations at the fanciest hotel dining room at the Ahwahnee Hotel across the valley, but I think not having to wear nice clothes combined with the waterfall views make this place a better deal!

We did not make the decision to take this vacation until mid-March, and all the rooms with 4 walls in Yosemite were either booked or over $500 a night. That should have prepared us for the huge crowds, but we were still surprised. We found a hotel just outside the park in El Portal called Cedar Lodge. (Don't be tricked, it's not really a town, just 2 hotels & a park service warehouse!) After our barely above camping experience at Sequoia and the not very fancy website of the Cedar Lodge, we were pleasantly surprised at how nice (and how large) the motel really is. The only down side was that the whole Merced River valley is a cell phone dead spot meaning the phones & ipad couldn't work and the hotel wanted to charge almost $10 a day for internet access available for only daytime hours and only in the lobby. We opted instead to be happy off the grid since our families had the name & number to the hotel just in case.

*Yes, obviously I'm posting this later since we didn't have internet. My one big issue with this hotel is that the doors opened to the outside not hallways and we didn't have a chain lock. At the time I thought it was no big deal because it was the wilderness but in googling to find the hotel's link for this post, I came across the fact that people were murdered in the area. Lovely. Glad I didn't know then!!! Honestly, I would have still stayed there and I still recommend it and the sister hotel down the street. Rooms were big and clean and nice.

Year 2 - Day 203 - July 23

Since Sequoia and Kings Canyon are actually one and the same, we went through one to get to the other today. It was just a lot of scenery today, with more death-defying rides around mountains. We saw another named tree, (The tallest? Biggest around at the bottom? I forget it's special feature already.)

and some more wildlife. Right near the tree, a group of loud teenagers said LOOK, a rattlesnake! Right THERE! So of course I ran the other way with one other lady while the rest of the population went to point and take pictures. That whole line about snakes being more scared of us than we are of them is completely insane, by the way. From what I understand, the snake hung out, posed for pictures, and then meandered away from the path. So much for my plan of people & paved paths being the safe place! After the snake, we saw some canyons (hence the name) and waterfalls.

Also, we found a lovely lake.

We had a fantastic dinner tonight at the Gateway Restaurant. After last night's dinner at the Mexican place, we were expecting very little. First of all, the Gateway is the first restaurant after you come down the mountain from the park. Secondly, it overlooks the river at a rock-rushing-quasi-waterfall location. With all that going for it, the food doesn't even have to taste good. However, it was fantastic. I had bacon wrapped filet and the most delicious Caesar salad ever. Mike had some kind of fish of course. Tomorrow it's more driving & then Yosemite!

Year 2 - Day 202 - July 22

After a spectacular hot free breakfast (Thank you, Best Western!), we hunted down Aptos Coffee this morning. Mike enjoyed the donut he had on the first day so much & we never got back to that donut kiosk in the ferry building. Google, however, told us where Pepple's Donuts delivered their goods and one happened to be right across the street from our hotel in Aptos! Random but fun for him. So Mike had the great breakfast at the hotel PLUS a fancy donut. We spent hours and hours driving today, through lots & lots of agriculture. 

We passed strawberries, peaches, apples, oranges, pomegranates, lettuce, grapes, raspberries, walnuts, and I'm sure more but those are the ones I can remember off the top of my head. At one point, we crossed the San Andreas Fault, but it didn't look like much. The part we crossed was just a lake.

When we finally got to Visalia (which is pronounced vuh-ZAIL-yuah not visa-lea, btw) we were starving. I checked on my phone and found the promising sounding Visalia Brewing Company. It was not promising, it was just a tiny bar with a super tiny menu, but it fed us. Another stretch of driving later, into the wild mountainous yonder, and we passed into Three Rivers and found our hotel. Three Rivers is the smallest town ever. It's a few motels, a few restaurants, and a grocery store. Plus, you know, rivers. They're all flowing pretty good and they're pretty, but that's about all the town has going for it. Our hotel is the Western Holiday Lodge ... but it quite obviously used to be a Best Western. They just scratched the "Best" off everything! It's not up to Best Western standards, but they're trying. It's definitely a family affair ... but just one step above camping. The room we're in is HUGE, probably at least 2x the size of our San Fran hotel, but there are cracks by the door and we have bugs flying around. Ick.

After dropping our stuff, we headed up into the park. Driving in, you get to follow the river for awhile, which is pretty the whole way.

Then, the pretty river stays down on earth where Rivers belong, and the road starts zooming around mountains, dangling high in the air. Mike loves zooming on those roads and I hate it. My right leg is already sore from slamming the imaginary brake pedal on my side, and I grab the handle on the door a lot. He just laughs at me and promises that he won't drive off the cliff. (I'm not so sure - it might not be his choice!) Luckily for me, they are putting in some lovely retaining walls on the way up the hill. Therefore, it's down to one lane for several miles and the traffic light tells you whether it's safe to drive.

I liked it because then we were in a line of cars and could only go as fast or slow as the car in front of us. :) At the top of the mountain, we saw the (supposed) biggest living organism on Earth,

The General Sherman. Yes. They name their trees. The sequoia trees are HUGE.

After walking the loop to see the giant tree, we decided to climb Moro Rock.

Well, I climbed as far as the first observation perch,

And Mike kept going all the way to the top.

I didn't have it in me to climb the giant rock without handrails or safety. Obviously I don't fall a lot when I walk around on a regular basis, but I lose my faith in my ability to not fall down & die when heights are involved. And really, the pictures aren't so different from the 2 heights, right?!?! :) We were reminded on the way down to watch for wildlife...

And then we saw the wildlife we were slowing down for!!

It was very cool to see. We got some closer zoomed in pictures, but this is the only one that didn't come out completely blurry. To finish out our day, we saw a tree that fell over,

(Which of course, also had a name, Buttress Tree) and then we drove through another tree that fell down,

which I think was tunnel log. (So creative with the names, huh?) Once we went down the mountain back to the bustling metropolis of Three Rivers, we hunted down a Mexican restaurant to finish our day.

Year 2 - Day 201 - July 21

We packed so much into today, but took barely any pictures. We left the city early this morning and picked up our rental car to begin our driving journey. We are making a giant loop around central CA over the next 7 days, but if we were on the east coast this much driving would take us through several states!! We cut over the mountains to Half Moon Bay and hit the wall of sea clouds. I could drive next to water forever, but we only stopped once to snap a shot of this lighthouse.

Somewhere between the lighthouse and Santa Cruz, we started seeing signs for strawberries at a stand. Strawberries! Strawberry pie! Strawberry shortcake! Chocolate covered strawberries! After the last one, I was hooked and made Mike turn in.

This farm was a great place. You could pick berries if you wanted, but they also had some picked as well as a ton of desserts ready to go. We split a shortcake and each had a chocolate berry, but I could have kept going easily. :)

We weren't in Santa Cruz long ... just for a few hours. We drove by the boardwalk and walked around downtown. I read about The True Olive Connection store online and wanted to visit after our fun visit to the olive oil store in San Diego last year. We controlled ourselves & only purchased 1 bottle each of oil (Garlic) and balsamic vinegar (oregano.) Mike also bought a bag of "design your own organic trail mix" next door at Nut Kreations.

Our hotel (The Best Western in Aptos) was adorable. We really enjoy Best Westerns wherever we go.

Since we had time and the roads were moving faster than we thought they would, we decided to visit Monterey too. We originally thought it was too much for a day, but we made it work. The whole downtown area in Monterey is cute. Mike did a wine tasting at a place that carried many area wines and bought a bottle. Then we had dinner at Hula's. It was FANTASTIC. I had Kalua pork with rice. It was delicious. Possibly my favorite meal yet. Mike had fish topped with dungeoness crab curry which he also really liked. He tried their bottled cream soda and that was fantastic, too. There were a ton of seals on a beach nearby, but we didn't get a picture. I would have assumed it was the SF Sea Lions on vacation in Monterey if the sign hadn't said they were seals. :)