Out of Portland, Into Northern CA and Yosemite

8/4/11.   

On the road and loving it!  Lucy is a blast to drive.  We’re moving faster than we typically will today in order to get down to Yosemite by tomorrow to meet Mike and E.  The first afternoon and night of the trip went just as we imagined it’d go in a camper bus- we stay off the interstates, drive some great byways and backroads, and when we get tired we pull off the road into a National Forest, pop the top, and we’re home.  And that’s exactly what we did.  Here’s home for the night:

 

There was a great ridge a couple minutes away where we watched the last of the sunset:

The next morning we hit the road early to get to Yosemite by mid-afternoon.  All the first- come-first-serve campsites in Yosemite fill up by about 9am during the summer, so Mike and E heroically woke up at 4am, left there home in the Bay area by 5am, and snagged the last camp spot in this amazing campground- Tioga Lake Campground:

It was at 9,800 feet.  That’s crazy.  You normally need to backpack all day to get to a campsite at 10k feet.  Campground was beautiful and quiet and filled with some great people we got to become friends with.  It was sunny and hot during the days, then the sun would dip below the mountain behind us at 7pm and the temperature would fall to just above freezing by the time the sun crawled up over the opposite mountain at 7:30 in the morning.  It was chilly, but Lucy with her insulated fiberglass roof kept us warm enough.  During the day, we swam in the nearly freezing lake, went on an easy, beautiful hike during the day, fell asleep in a sunny meadow, and in the evening watched a bear walked along the shore within a hundred feet of our campsite.  

 On the 7^th we drove into Yosemite Valley with the waterfalls, half-dome, El Capitan, and a million other eager tourists like ourselves.  It’s an amazing place and an awesome road.  Wish we could have ridden Bonnie here!