Day 24

Today we moved on from Yosemite bound for Lake Tahoe. We had to leave fairly early as it is a long drive out of the park and we wanted to stop at a few places along the Tioga Pass which, at 9950 feet, is the highest place we will visit on our journey. On the way up to the pass we travelled through Tuolumne Meadows which was really cool, you can camp and hike here but the altitude must be a killer for that! The descent from Tioga is steep and windy until you reach Mono Lake which is massive. From here the road heads towards Carson City and another twisty ascent up to Lake Tahoe, Mum went very quiet again in the front of the van - it's funny but on all the steep bits Mum seems to be sitting to the outside so she gets to see much more than she actually wants to! There was still snow on the mountains up here even though it was quite hot which was strange. We drove down towards Heavenly and on towards South Lake Tahoe, Chris recognised some of the places as he has been snowboarding here before but said that a lot had also changed in that time. We found our campsite easily and made our way round to the pitch which backed on to a stream. When we asked at reception how close everything was we were told that most people use their bikes to get around so, as we didn't have bikes, we had to take the RV out again and went to the Visitor Centre. The Centres are a brilliant place to find out about the local area and we have used them everywhere we have been, we found out about the estates built on the edge of the lake which were like holiday camps, one of which still hosted holidaymakers and, more importantly, had a restaurant. We drove down to the beach and walked along to Camp Richardson and a restaurant called the Beacon where we stopped and had dinner for the evening while we listened to a live band which was cool. I had my first bread bowl of clam chowder and prawns, Chris had steak and mum had ribs and got addicted (not really) to a drink called the Rumrunner. After dinner we drove back to the campsite where we sat and chatted until bedtime. J