Yosemite National Park

 07/04/2021

On our family's trip to the US, we decided to discover the Yosemite National Park, in California's Sierra Nevada mountains. My mom hired a car from San Fransisco so we could drive there. Unfortunately, my dad scraped the side when he was backing out of the parking lot.... And of course, mom had forgotten to pay for insurance😩. So dear readers, don't forget to pay for insurance when you travel.


The drive to our inn took 9 hours whereas it should've taken 5. Why? We got lost, because we hadn’t entered the right address in the GPS. Dad stumbled across a Christian camp. The campers called our inn for us and helped us find it. It was 9pm when we finally arrived at the inn, we were so hungry that the first thing we asked was if they had any food. Everything was already closed....except the vending machine. Those instant noodles were the best meal I had ever had. Any kid who hasn’t  eaten anything for more than 6 hours will agree with me.

We spent the next morning strolling in the Mariposa Grove of Giant Séquoias- the largest trees in the world. The biggest Sequoia tree stump ever, is now on display at the British Museum of Natural History. We then walked to the El Capitan mountain, a vertical rock formation 2 307m tall, once said to be impossible to climb. We didn't climb it. Yosemite was exactly how I had imagined it. Huge, imposing and seemingly never-ending. My first thought was: "Wait, I've seen this place before. It's the Macbook background picture!"


 my brother and I in front of El Capitan           my parents                                                       me


In the middle of the wild Yosemite forest lies a fortress. The Ahwahnee Hotel is resplendent with tapestries and artworks, and looks like it came out of a movie. There is a dress code to dine: "For dinner, we require gentlemen to wear long pants and a shirt with a collar, and ask that women wear a dress, skirt, or long pants with a blouse. Please refrain from wearing shorts, T-shirts, tank tops, flip-flops, and baseball caps. Children over the age of four are asked to dress for the occasion as well." 

Unfortunately, my mother was wearing pants. Despite her best efforts to buy a skirt at the gift shop, nothing fit her. By the time we went back to the hotel everything was closed so we had Chinese takeaway at our hotel room instead.                                                     






Yosemite is a great place to go hiking for the whole family whether you want to walk a lot or not so much.                                                                                                                                    

(FYI: The whole time mom pronounced Yosemite: yo-seh-mi-te, yo-seh-mit or even yo-ze-mit instead of yow-seh-muh-tee). Apparently, She wasn't the only one. 

Note: This video was posted on Youtube by the Independent newspaper, no copyright intended.


















Location: Forest Rte 2S62, Groveland, CA 95321, USA

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tahiti: My "Home" Island Part 1

Image
09/09/2021 from NASA © Carolyn Fisk  So far, I have written about the places I visited, but never about where I live.....so here it is. Since 2015, I have been living on an island the size of Singapore in the the middle of the Pacific Ocean...Tahiti.  You're probably thinking of beaches, coconut trees, the 1962 movie "Mutiny of the Bounty" starring Marlon Brando (btw one of his granddaughters was in my class last year) or Disney "Moana", and you would be right. Though, I want to show you much more to Tahiti than these images. It is more than a tropical tourist destination about 4 000km away from the nearest metropolitan city, Auckland. It's an island with an incredible cultural heritage. This heritage has been passed down through surf, dance and va'a. Surfing originated in Polynesia and  Tahiti is THE surfing paradise, where spots with crashing waves can be heard for miles around.   The first person to  document board riding in the Pacific islands was...
Read more

Macao

Image
26/06/2021 In July 2018, after our trip to Taiwan and Singapore, I visited Macao with my mom. I had only ever heard of Macao, or the “Asian Las Vegas”, from movies. It was exactly like it had been depicted to me, from the huge hotels and casinos to the replicas of the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower. It seemed that everything was inspired by Italy, Portugal and France. The city’s occidental touch dates back to the sixteenth century, when it was a Portuguese colony and the oldest European colony in Asia. Macao has switch hands quite a few times between China and Portugal. After the Opium war in 1887, China handed Macao back to Portugal under the condition that they helped Hongkongers smuggle opium from India into China. During WWII, Macao’s inhabitants supplied fuel to Japanese planes. When the US found out, they decided to raid the city, but after protests, had to repay 20,000,000 USD to the Portuguese government. On December 1st 1999, Macao was proclaimed a Special Administrati...
Read more

Paris in July 2021 Part 1

Image
  19/07/2021 On the 8th July, after a week of preparation, a 21hr flight with my mask on and a lot of uncertainties, I arrived in Paris with my dad. The preparations involved asking for an authorisation to re-enter our country on the  Electronic Travel Information System ( ETIS)   platform , an electronic travel authorisation, a proof of vaccination for my dad and a declaration to show that we didn't have any Covid symptoms, plus the usual passports and plane tickets.  We travelled to Paris to visit our family and friends. I was born there and it had been my home for five years. My paternal grandparents live in an apartment on the fifth floor and her neighbours had lent us their apartment so we were on the same floor as them. The apartment measured 150 square meters with a wide entrance and mirrors everywhere. There was a mirror in every living space so that you could see your reflection no matter where you were standing. There were thr...
Read more