A Quick Visit To Yosemite

Our plan for day four was to go to Yosemite.  We headed out of Fresno and headed for the National Park.  It was a good drive to the park.  We were told that the national parks would be very busy this time of year.  It was very busy.  It was a long and winding road to get to the park, but once we got to the park entrance it was a stand still.  We finally got in and it was crazy.  We had two places that we wanted to see.  The park is huge, and we knew we were just going to pop in, see a little of the beauty and high tail it out.  I expected that we would just stop in a few places and snap some pictures.  What we found was that it was so crowded we couldn't even park.  We snapped some pictures from the car and worked our way to Yosemite Falls.  When we got there, there was no place to park at all.  We drove around and around trying to find a spot.  

Eventually, Kristi just stayed with the van and the kids and I walked to the base of the falls.  It was very beautiful, as was the rest of the park.  We took some pictures and the kids climbed on some rocks.  We couldn't be gone too long because Kristi was still just hanging in the van and trying to stay out of the way.  All we could do was get back in the van and travel out as we took in the scenery and snapped more pictures.  It was so busy that the time we spent in the park was a lot longer than we expected.  As a result, we were unable to visit Kings Canyon National Park.  We traveled to Tulare, CA, for the night.  Our next stop was to Sequoia National Park to the see the large Sequoias.  This was something Alex wanted to do.

It was a long drive to Tulare, but we got in a little earlier because we didn't hit Kings Canyon.  After so many hours in the car, the kids were excited to swim in the hotel pool when we arrived. I worked on our travel itinerary in the business center, while Kristi played judge to the kids’ pool competitions. We had planned to get to bed early, but we ended up having to revise our plans for Day 5. We were thankful that I met someone in the business center who told me more about the Sequoia National Park and helped us plan to get the most out of our quick visit there!  I didn't really know specifically to go to see the Sequoia Groves, especially the one that contained General Sherman.  


We usually plan things pretty thoroughly, but it seemed like time passed so fast after our late release from school.  We tried to plan more and more details as we could, but we started at the beginning of our trip and worked back.  I ran out of time to research Kings Canyon and Sequoia.  As a result, we drove farther south than we would have had to.  We could have stayed in Fresno again instead of Tulare, which would have saved us about forty-five minutes of travel and given us a little more down time.  I don't think it ended up adding much to the length of the next day, but it did mean that we could have driven through Kings Canyon on the way to the Sequoia Grove. It still bugs me, but there was nothing we could do by the time we figured it out.  We did decide that we would start out earlier than planned the next morning.  We wanted to get to Las Vegas via Death Valley!