Yosemite Road Trip! (Part 1)

After living in California for over two years, we finally decided to take a pilgramage to Yosemite National Park: the breathtaking, gradiose, and tourist ridden Sierra Nevada valley. We dissuaded ourselves from going in the past because we wanted to try to avoid tourist season. Well, it seems that there is a reason that more people come during the peak tourist season - it isn't 35 degrees at night with no heat in a canvas tent! More on that later...

Despite our best efforts to leave right after work from San Francisco, our plans were thwarted by the other half million people trying to escape the City for the long weekend.

Tip #1: Do not attempt to leave downtown San Francisco by car on a Friday afternoon. Everybody else is doing the same thing.

So, we were off to a great start...by 7:00pm we had made it all the way to Livermore for a gourmet dinner at Quizno's. We really just got off 580 to let the traffic die down, but we ran into Friday night high school orgy at the mall. And don't diss Quizno's - this is the staple of road-trip food!

The traffic had died down substantially as we zig-zagged across the central valley on Highway 120 arriving at the Curry Village registration desk just before midnight. The road into Yosemite was breathtaking: the full moon overhead lit up the granite valley walls with a spooky white shimmer that towered over us.

Arrival
We expected to be the last of the night to check-in to our tent cabin lodging, but it turns out that the entire Bay Area decided leave and arrive with us. The half-hour wait at the registration desk was thoroughly enhanced by the ten-minute "bear safety" video looping over the employees' heads.

"Do not leave food in your car. Do not leave food in your tent. We hope you didn't go to Quizno's on the way here because a bear will smell it and tear open the roof of your car like this...." --video showing bear tearing off the roof of a car like ours--

So, if a bear can do that to a car, what will it to our paper-thin, vinyl tent cabin walls? What if I smell like Quizno's?

Continued: Yosemite Road Trip! (Part 2)