Trip Pictures (Mike, this one's for you!)

As I mentioned in my last post, we took an epic family trip last week.





Entering Yosemite from CA-140

Our first stop--Tunnel View

The kids seem to be enjoying the day.

View from Yosemite Valley

Can you hear me yelling at the kids?  Especially the one with the camera?  There were signs posted all over about how some fleas (that live on squirrels and other small rodents) have tested positive for plague.  For PLAGUE.

Pictures really don't do it justice--to come into a park and see all these massive granite mountains.

In years past this was probably a riverbed with dangerously rushing waters.  Not so this year.

I'm 98% sure this is Sentinel Dome.

Half Dome.  One of the coolest things I've seen.  Haze in the picture is actually smoke from a wildfire that is about 3 hours away.

At the top of Sentinel Dome.  Not easy to walk up a big rock at 8000' elevation. But we're smiling anyway.

 A couple of days later, we were heading north to Muir Woods.

Again, pictures don't do it justice.

Sausalito for lunch.

We spent hours (and hours) in the car:  Three hours from SFO to Yosemite.  At least a half hour from our hotel in Yosemite to anything in the park.  Three hours back to San Francisco.  Two and a half hours to Monterey. Another two and a half hours to Hearst Castle.  And then four hours back to SFO in time for the red-eye home. The silver lining to that is that Rob realized that he does NOT want to take a family trip where we drive cross-country.  I'm pretty pleased about that development.  I prefer family vacations where we're in one spot (like the beach) and we generally eat in and just relax.  I don't particularly enjoy trips where we have to unload and reload the suitcases and the car every couple of days.  It's hard enough to get everyone packed up the first time, and to have to worry about re-packing and making sure nothing gets left behind and keeping the dirty clothes separate from the clean clothes...well, it's almost too much.

So that was our summer trip.  Pretty grand.  I'm sure the kids will look back on that one as pretty awesome.