So here's the story...
My Dad and I left the warm Seattle weather for the chilly temps of Oakland. Not much to say about Oakland, we landed, rented a car...
...and got the hell out. Went to San Francisco, had the best hamburger of my life, walked up to Coit Tower...
...cruised Haight Ashbury...
...Golden Gate Park and the beach...
....saw the Golden Gate bridge covered in fog...
...standard San Francisco stuff.
Then we shot up the coast, tried to go to Lagunita's Brewing but that was a bust (it was just a warehouse). Luckily Russian River Brewing was not too far away and amazingly good. The have a belgian selection to rival the best. If you're near Santa Rosa at any point I highly recommend it. The coast was beautiful...
...We drove up Highway 1 for a good distance, Point Arena to Ft Bragg. Stopped in Mendocino which was gorgeous. The sun had finally come out...
...Ft Bragg was pretty chill. We stopped at North Coast Brewing for dinner where I had the 10 piece beer sampler, got a little tipsy. Then trekked back to Ukiah to sleep.
Now at this point we were going to continue up to the Red Woods, but being as both my dad and I had been there we omitted it and just bombed east for Reno. Not much in the middle of Cali, lots of farms.
Got into the Reno and it was just like Oakland, rainy and cold...
...Roamed around some casinos and gambled for a while. The casinos made me edgy because I was quitting smoking and being surrounded by it started to grate on me. So I headed back to the Circus Circus...
...only to find that I got back to the room before my dad, go figure. We got up the next day and headed for Tahoe....
...Beautiful place. Clouds hung over the lake and once again it was raining, but still amazing...
...Casino's were much nicer there too, a lot more like Vegas...
The next day was when we both blown away. We headed south from Reno into California. Entered Yosemite at Tioga Pass, about 10,000 feet, to a breath taking sight...
...We both agreed that if we had known we'd probably have just planned the whole week in Yosemite. Once in the park we tried to see as much as we could so here's a quick run down: Lembert Dome...
...Tuolumne Meadows, Tenaya Lake, and Olmsted Point (which had great views of Half Dome)...
...before we dropped down into the valley. The valley was awesome. El Capitan...
...Bridalvale Falls...
...Yosemite Falls...
...Half Dome...
...and a ton more to see. The entire valley was lined with rock formations littered with water falls, like Cascade Falls...
...At this point we were both pretty spent so headed south and found our hotel for the night.
Now we had planned to go to Fresno but that also got cut out of the trip, for good reason. We needed more time at Yosemite. So on the second day we started by going the the Mariposa Grove, which had a ton of HUGE trees...
...The most memorable was the Giant Grizzly...
...which was over 200 feet tall with branches 7 feet in diameter! We hiked a couple miles here before heading up for higher ground. Next was Glacier Point which had some of the best views in the whole park...
...We took a ton of pics from up there...
...Once the camera needed a rest...
...we headed back down to the valley for lunch and then it was out to Hetch Hetchy.
Hetch Hetchy is on the far west side of the park and we actually had to leave and reenter to get there. The road down to the dam was small and built on a sheer cliff. Dad didn't like that so much, so I ended up driving. We got down to O'Shaughnessy Dam...
...which is a bummer that it exists because the pre-dam pics we saw were amazing, and decided to do a "little" walk around the reservoir to see if we couldn't get a better picture of Wapama Falls...
...Ended up hiking all the way to the falls...
...The spray around the falls created a rainbow that hung just above the rocks...
...Once again, awesome.
We headed out of Hetch Hetchy and started towards Stockton. Not much to say about Stockton. It was a place to sleep and unwind before heading back to Oakland and Seattle.
When we landed in Seattle there was a slight drizzle and with as much fun as I had, I was glad to be home.
So that's my trip in a nutshell. I'm sure I forgot some stuff, but that's the meat of it. If you want to see the pictures that go along you can check them out at http://www.flickr.com/photos/desomniac/
I've leave you with a couple of more pics from the trip...
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