Tuesday, July 03: Yosemite
I recognize that litter
This was (not surprisingly) sort of a quiet day. Since Amy was sort of out of commission, we decided that Mike and I would try the horseback riding tour (actually muleback), as Amy is allergic to horses.
We slept in a bit, so we got a late start. There was a backup at the entrance, but it was only about 5-min long. As opposed to Saturday, we had an easy time parking in day-use parking.
Mike and I took the bus over to the stables where we found (again not too surprisingly) that they were booked for the day. So we made reservations for the next day. I couldn’t reach Amy on the cell phone, so we took the bus back to the visitor’s center, as I thought Amy would be in that area.
We wandered through the Indian museum and ran into Amy there. Then we had lunch. We saw some billboards talking about an evening program about Search and Rescue. That seemed strangely apropos, so I bought some tickets. It was just about 2:00, and checking the valley “newspaper”, we found a naturalist walk/talk about bears at 3:00, so we decided to go to that. Amy took the bus over, but Mike wanted to walk, so he and I did. Along the way, we stopped at the car and got Mike his camelback and some trekking poles.
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That program lasted about an hour and a half, then we took the bus over to the Happy Isle nature center, which Amy wanted to see. We got there around 4:50 and just got in when they closed. I wandered around the “happy isles” (a pair of islands in the stream), and I was kicking myself for not having a tripod. The area was in the shade, and it looked like a good place to take pictures of the stream.
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We were then on a bit of a schedule, due to the program that night. We took the bus over to Yosemite Village, but the bus driver fortunately announced that the Grill there was closed. So we continued on to the Lodge and had a quick dinner at the food court. Amy took the bus back to the visitor’s center (one stop), but once again Mike wanted to walk. We got there barely in time.
I thought it was a movie, but it was a slide show narrated by a SAR technician. I thought it was very interesting. I recognized a bit of it from first-hand experience. He made an interesting point: being next to a stream above a waterfall was equivalent to being next to the cliff itself.
Afterwards, we talked to the presenter, saying basically “we used your services two days ago”. As a result, when we left it was rather dark, quiet, and peaceful. The main downside was that we still had an hour drive back to the Bug. It was a neat ambiance while we were walking back to the car, however.
Earlier in the day, walking around with canyon walls in the background, it was almost like being in a painting; the grandeur was almost overwhelming.
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