Where do I begin? It's been a busy couple of days on the road, but now we're in the city of San Francisco! As you may recall from my previous blog entry, the night before last, a bee stung me on my leg in Yosemite Park. When I woke up, my foot was swollen like a football and it really hurt! I could barely muster the strength to hobble to the restroom in the morning and then spent another hour lying on the deflated air mattress dozing in and out of sleep. I felt e...

Oh boy, what a day! We both didn't get much sleep - Bridal Veil has a weird microclimate, I guess because of the altitude and surrounding areas, and experiences bitterly cold evenings and frost-covered, misty mornings (there's probably a very good reason it's got that name!). Last night, for example, the temperature plummeted to below freezing - in August! I was so cold that I spent most of the night alternating between shivering and trying to rub some feeling in...

Last night I slept in the car. We'd pitched a tent at Sunset Campground in King's Canyon, then gone to have a shower and dinner at the Grove centre. When we returned at about 9:30pm, there was a large, extended Mexican family that had just arrived with 3 cars and were getting ready to set up 4 tents only 2 metres away, had just started a fire and were wanting to BBQ food at 10pm at night! My experience from the previous night at Potwisha was noisy, to say the le...

After a sleepless night, we headed up through the foothills on a treacherously windy mountain road into the Giant Forest. Here, we came across the world's largest tree: General Sherman is about 275 feet tall (equivalent to a 27-storey building!), 36,5 feet wide and about 2000 years old. In theory, there is enough wood in this tree to build 25x2-bed houses (if the wood were good enough to build with). However, it is a very brittle and soft wood. It holds the heavy...

Wow, what a day! Not only did I walk amongst giants today at Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park, but I also drove on the iconic Highway 1 along California's spectacularly diverse Pacific coastline and then crossed a desert to get to Sequoia NP! All in a day's driving! I woke up very early to a crisp cold morning with mist shrouding the tips of the redwood trees. They smell a bit like dusty, sour pine - a very pleasant earthy aroma - something like aged oak, perhaps? We...