Yosemite National Park

Sunday, October 26th we decided to check out Yosemite National Park. It is about 90 miles from Chowchilla, CA and a nice scenic drive along the Mercede River. We had been to Yosemite earlier in May, but were unable to stop and see anything because we only drove through. We wanted to do a hike, so we chose to do the Vernal Falls hike which was about 4 miles round trip and much uphill climbing and since we have been sitting a lot lately, we had a feeling it would be a struggle for us...never the less we wanted to do it. The weather was perfect. Mid to lower 80's. Yosemite is fabulous and beautiful. We tend to compare places like this to Zion National Park which we love to hike in. This place is just as beautiful in a different way. There are many more trees here and so it feels much cozier than Zion which has more stone landscape and less trees. Trees were nice since we hiked through them as they shaded us most of the time. We drove by El Capitan where many of those rock climbers hike vertical rock cliffs and sleep hanging from the rocks. It was very beautiful too with the changing of the fall leaves and all the fantastic colors. I'm sure this is happening at home too, but we had not been able to be around anything like that on this trip, so I'm so happy we got to see the fall colors in Yosemite.

Our hike was toward Vernal Fall which, earlier in the year, is a huge waterfall. This time of year it was a bit tired with not much of a "fall" at all, but the hike was good. We were proud of ourselves for pushing ourselves past the initial falls to the higher level climbing up rock steps that were carved and blown out of the landscape. It was a wonderful day in Yosemite.

Today we landed in Morgan Hill, CA. It is relatively close, to the south, of San Jose and from here we will check out this area extensively. Our motorhome site is nice and new and we have paid for our time here until November 9th. We will investigate more of San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Cruz, Monterey, Carmel and anywhere else that looks interesting. We will start to get more serious about our searching since we are more south and that's where we would tend to want our second home to be "IF" California is the lucky State to have us.