West coast, best coast? (Part 1)

I believe losing track of days of the week is a signal of a trip that truly takes you away from the routine of normal life. This happened every summer of my childhood, but it’s been much more than a decade since I’ve asked, “what day is it?”

That changed while we were on the Pacific coast, and it was glorious.

We completely lost ourselves in all the great sights, activities and company in June and July. The time we spent with friends and family was probably the best part of our time out west — we enjoyed great conversations, fantastic meals and deep belly laughs.

Life on the road is good, and I’ve fallen badly behind on the blog while enjoying it. I’m not at all sorry about it, but I do want to catch up on documenting our journey, so here’s what we did with the remainder of our time on the west coast…

Sequoia National Park

Sequoia National Park is home to the world’s largest tree — not widest or tallest, but largest by volume. They call it General Sherman and yowza, it’s large and in charge … but so are the many other sequoia trees in the park.

We explored several sections and had some great views, but I most enjoyed getting up close to the trees and examining their unique bark. Part of the reason these grow so large is because their bark helps them survive fire. The protective bark is so unique, it compresses a little when you push on it, almost the way a barely ripe avocado compresses under pressure. It’s a wildly unusual sensory experience considering you’re touching wood.

We also learned a valuable RV lesson at Sequoia: air conditioning is a requirement in the summer in central California. The park where we stayed outside of Sequoia was really full one night, so we had to dry camp and therefore didn’t have a power source to run the air conditioning. We thought this would be fine for a night, since we had spent the past few weeks on the temperate California coast.

Mercy, were we wrong. I estimate the temperature that night was 90°, which means it was a balmy 95-ish in the RV. We opened every window and door, I slept upside down in our bed because it put my head a little closer to the screen door, and even put a wet washcloth on my forehead to try and cool down. All were useless and it was terrible. More than a month later, I still can’t find it in my soul to make jokes about that night, so I’ll just move on.

Visitor’s Center sign depicting the differences between Redwoods and Sequoias, and offering some scale.

Yosemite National Park

If you ever have an opportunity to go to Yosemite, please, please do it. Actually, don’t wait for the opportunity to present itself, plan or save or whatever you have to do, but do not miss this place.

Below are our highlights, but I’ll say that literally everywhere in the park met or exceeded our high expectations and I think I could live there if not for the crowds … apparently other people think it’s pretty cool, too.

• Hetch Hetchy: Many decades ago, there was a big fight over whether to convert this beautiful valley into a reservoir to provide water to the San Francisco area. The conservationists lost and the place no doubt lost some grandeur but it is still breathtaking.
• Lower Yosemite Falls Trail: Thanks to all the snowfall this year, upper and lower Yosemite waterfalls were huge, powerful and magnificent when we were there. We completed the short hike and facetimed our oldest nephews from there and they were mesmerized. Robert instantly quipped, “Mom, I want to go there.” We’re pretty sure he’s a genius.
• The Majestic Yosemite Hotel: When we return to Yosemite, we’ll stay here. The gorgeous lodge was designed to attract powerful people, so that they would fall in love with and preserve the surrounding land. Have you ever heard a more brilliant plan for conservation?!

The grounds are impeccable and the lodge serves high tea daily for guests … pretty much my dream accommodations.

• Vernal Falls trail: We did a great morning hike to Vernal Fall, which is a very popular trail and also a treacherous one if you don’t obey park rules.

You see several waterfalls on the way to Vernal, which is great for sightseeing and also for the refreshing mist and cool breezes. However, that also means there’s lots of streams along the route and the water moves fast. Various signs along the route warn people about this, with the most scarring sign reading:

“’We weren’t swimming, we were only wading.’ –Grieving mother, August 2012.” It goes on to explain how her two young sons were swept away and drowned.

So, obviously, I’m going to have nightmares about that for the rest of my life, but the hike was great and scenic, and I’d definitely still recommend it as long as you stay on dry land.

Eat your hearts out.

• Rainbow Pool: To camp in most national parks, you need to make reservations several weeks in advance. To camp in Yosemite, people reserve sites about a year ahead of time. We tend to make reservations between one and four days before arrival, so we camped outside the park entrance, which allowed us to discover the delightful Rainbow Pool swimming hole.

Any swimming hole in this part of the country will be popular in the summer because of the heat, but this one was in a gorgeous mountain setting, and had cliffs you could jump off and a natural water slide. We loved our afternoon there but forgot to bring our cameras and phones from the car, so we only have this one picture, snapped while we drove away.

San Francisco … again

We returned to San Francisco for a very festive Pride weekend, and to pick up our friend Caroline.

Our friends Tab, Alex, Lindsey and Brendan — all San Fran locals — told us about the big party that accompanied Pride weekend activities and we were all very excited about “Dyke Day” in Dolores Park. We had a great time and met many wonderful, friendly people. It was essentially a time of celebrating sunshine, day drinking and love with hundreds of strangers. What more could you ask for? Oh, you wanted to watch a friend slide down an entire flight of stairs on her backside and halfway through just raise her hands as if going along for the ride? Yeah, we had that, too.

Note: This was caused by a shoe malfunction, not inebriation.

We also got to see Mariana, my roommate from freshman year of college, and to meet her sweet husband and precious baby girl in SF. Mariana and I find ourselves in the same city once every five-ish years and it’s always heartwarming to again realize that we can talk, laugh and reminisce like no time has passed. I think we continue to be each other’s least-expected friend, which is a true gift. Naturally, I forgot to take a picture with her.

Yes, we have inflatable couches. Yes, they create a spectacle every time we bust them out.

Photo and creativity credit to Caroline.

Lake Tahoe

Lake Tahoe in the summer? Yep! It’s awesome! We did a number of short hikes, took so many pictures of the incredible scenery, and dipped our feet in the frigid lake (Toyo swam, the maniac) but I felt the highlight was the gondola ride.

The gondola is at Heavenly Mountain and the views riding up and down are spectacular. The Heavenly Mountain folks brilliantly added a number of family-friendly summer activities along the different stops of their winter ski runs, making Tahoe a true winter and summer wonderland.

Caroline joined us for this part of the trip, and it was so good to have a friend visit and share the RV life! Our second night at the campsite, we were invited to cocktail hour at our neighbor’s RV. This has not happened before or since, which we think means Toyo and I are somehow unapproachable as a duo, but throw Caroline into the mix and there are no strangers. Three’s company, I guess?

Wishing Toyo was around to photograph all of our past road trips together …

Hammock naps are the best, just ask Toyo.

Halfway up the Gondola ride…

Lassen Volcanic National Park

We definitely should have looked this one up before we went because most of the park was still closed due to snow pack, so we only spent half a day there seeing what we could by car. The volcano is huge, and it’s cool to see how the explosion from more than 100 years ago still affects the landscape today, but it was a little bit of a letdown not to get very close to the real action.

This giant rock was bigger than the Suburban and shot hundreds of feet away from the volcano when it erupted.

Redwoods National Park

This place was peaceful and lovely. We got there just in time to claim permit no. 47 out of 50 to hike to Tall Trees Grove.

Just like we all learned in elementary school, the trees were so tall that most of the time we couldn’t even see the tops of them. The redwoods weren’t as wide as the sequoias, but this park was much less crowded, and we had air conditioning, so we enjoyed our time here a bit more.

It also didn’t hurt that our friends Adam and Sona (and Pickle) joined us here. We got really lucky that we happened to be in this part of the country while Adam and Sona made their move to Tacoma, because we got to see a lot of them in July … more pictures to come with these guest stars.

They made this look easy…

Once is never enough …

The hard drive where we store our pictures just decided to stop working, so I’m going to pause this blog post right here. The Recalculating tech team (Toyo) is working to resolve the issue, stay tuned…