Yosemite National Park, CA

30 July 2006

Today we did something that we only did once before on this entire trip... NOTHING. Our reasons were simple, we needed a break. We have been on the road for 40 days and only took one day "off." That was in Las Vegas and we still ran around a bit doing shopping and some other errands. We will be home in two weeks from tomorrow and every day has something scheduled. Starting tomorrow we will be in the San Francisco/Monterey for a week. And then we have a week of high mileage travel getting home. Today, we only left the campground to fill up the truck with fuel for tomorrow's trip. We sat in our campsite and read. I have to tell you that is refreshing.

There is another reason we decided to spend the day in the campground. Yosemite National Park is big, about the size of Rhode Island. Unlike Rhode Island, there are only a few roads that get you to the places where you can see the park's natural beauty. We covered two to those roads in our first two days here. Because of the closure of the most direct route to the park from Mariposa, getting to the other routes would involve a 200 mile round trip. Most of the trip would be on mountain roads where we can only average 40 miles and hour, if we are lucky. This meant five hours on the road and we decided that it was too much. We had seen Yosemite's icon, El Capitan, Half Dome, Yosemite Falls and Rainbow Falls and that was good enough for this trip.