Friday 24 May - Sunday 26 May

Yosemite National Park

We hired a car for our next part of the trip and drove out of SF heading for Yosemite National Park, on... as luck would have it - Memorial Day weekend! Yes, so the world and his wife were doing the same thing as we were...this also meant we couldn't get our accommodation inside the park as its been booked up to a year in advance. We were very happy with the delightful hostel we found just outside the park called the Yosemite Bug. It was only a 15min drive to get into the park from there and you paid $20 for a 7 day pass, so we could come and go as we pleased.

Yosemite Valley is just breathtakingly beautiful! You can understand why they needed to preserve this National Park for future generations as the Giant Sequoias found here, don't grow anywhere else on earth. On the 1st day we took the 11km roundtrip hike called the Mist Trail up to Vernal Falls and then onto Nevada Falls. Its called the Mist Trail as the spray from Vernal Falls creates a misty rain that engulfs you as you hike up past it - the double rainbow created by the mist cant be beat. Apparently if you do the hike at night it creates a moonbow - would've loved to have seen that as it was a full moon that night. We did manage to get a full moon on the hike down - it was a bear bum - just as he was folding a newspaper up and waltzing off into the distance - black bear...tick!

On Day 2 we visited two of the Giant Sequoia groves - Tuolumne and the Mariposa Grove. My knees were shot from the hike down from the waterfalls the day before, so we had to take it very easy and just do some easy trails around the groves. These impressive giants were thousands and thousands of years old with girths that measured up to 34 metres in circumference.