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Published: October 9th 2005
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After waking up in Bishop and packing up all the stuff we headed off towards our next destination - this amazing, yummy German bakery about 2 minutes from the campsite! It was amazing, so much yummy food. We had been warned we were going on a serious hike at Yosemite National Park so I decided why not make the most of our little stop and buy quite a few yummy things to eat for the day. Outside we met a guy who called himself the "Sierra Phantom" and claimed to be the inventor of glitter. He was quite a funny character. Just looked like a normal old man but had some stories to tell ya!
The drive to Yosemite was very long (about 4 or 5 hours) but when we got there we knew it was well worth it. This place was so beautiful. Possibly my favourite place on the tour, hence there are lots of photos in this blog. We stopped a couple of times along the way to take photos of the amazing scenery. There's a monolith there that's the second biggest in the world (the title of biggest goes to our very own Ayres Rock! Yeah Australia).
So after spending quite a long time taking photos and things, we then went off to go for a long hike.
We hiked up for about an hour (this doesn't seem that hard but it was uphill the whole way) to the top of a really beautiful waterfall. Along the way of course there was some great photo ops so we took full advantage of them. At the top of the waterfall was an emerald lake that we'd been eager to go for a swim in. There was an area where you could slide down the rocks into the water and some people were doing that when we got there so we decided to use Rob as our "slide tester". Unfortunately he decided to go from way to high up and the speed of the waterfall and the slipperiness of the rocks stopped him from being able to control where he was sliding so he hurt himself a little on the way down and at the bottom slammed his leg into a rock. So we canned that idea and some of us brave girls decided to slide from much further down. We used Marina as our new "slide tester"
Three Aussies at Yosemite
Aussie Aussie Aussie, oi oi oi! and unfortunately she also hurt herself so we canned the whole idea of sliding and just went for a short dip. The water was absolutely FREEZING - lucky for Rob & Marina who could effectively "ice" their injuries just but sitting in the water! So after a short time swimming and a long time sunbaking, we decided it was time to make the long trek back down the million (well maybe about 300) steps. At the bottom of the steps there was about 1.5km to go of the trail so Rob and I decided to be crazy and run the rest of the way. It felt amazing.
Unfortunately for me the group decided they wanted to go see some Sequoia trees, these are some of, if not the biggest trees in the world. But it meant another hour's hike and I really wasn't in the mood so I whinged the whole way! We have trees in Australia, I didn't particularly care if these were big ones.
The night was to be quite entertaining. Just as the last of us were heading to our tents to go to sleep at around 1am, 2 sprinklers came up from the ground
The monolith (can't remember the name of it)
2nd largest in the world, dwarfed by Ayres Rock (Uluru)! right in the middle of where our tents all were and started squirting water around. While I frantically tried to peg in everybody's rain tarps (waking most people up as they had no idea what was going on) Priska tried to call the camp managers to see why the heck this was happening right in the middle of our site. We were abruptly told that we shouldn't have put the tents past the barricade. Barricade? We asked. There were some rocks and tree trunks laying around but quite spread out so we weren't aware that they were a barricade. Apparently they were and the campsite managers weren't about to do anything about the sprinklers that were set to a timer coming on for 15 minutes every hour through the night. To water the DIRT. Yes, dirt. There was no grass in the whole area. So we just put big pots over the sprinklers to stop them squirting on our tents and went to sleep. Showers and laundry was done tonight. Very special!
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Gregg Goers
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Love the Pictures
My class is reading a book about animals in Yosemite and we looked at your pictures and we thought they were "beautiful and cool." This is definately a place I want to visit.