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Published: April 11th 2012
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So i'll pick up where Aled's left off. We (Aled, James, Tim & I) had just picked up our rental car at LAX for the drive to Yosemite & San Francisco. We had planned to do this over four days stopping at San Luis Obispo, Yosemite and then somewhere nearer San Fran. It was nice to have a car again and we were really looking forward to driving up the Californian coast.
started off the drive to our first night's stop, San Luis Obispo, following the beautiful coastal highway route 1. Navigating our way through busy LA which was a tad challening, but soon we were past Santa Monica beach and away from the city.
The road soon became very scenic, and very typically Californian with lots of white sandy beaches and lots of big beautiful coastal houses. We definitely played Phantom Planet's California in the car more than once.
We stopped off at Santa Barbara as I was supposed to be meeting up with an old friend of my mum's, but sadly she was too busy with work so couldn't say hello. We had a lovely walk along the pier and a drive around the town. Santa
Barbara was a very beautiful place, and definitely felt like one of the most "californian" places we had seen. It seemed a lot "richer" than the other californian cities we had been too and definitely less rough. The sort of Californian dream that is depicted in films!
After a few hours more driving we reached San Luis Obispo, our half way to Yosemite stop for the night. The HI hostel was a very cute, friendly guesthouse in a residential area close to downtown. As it was close to Halloween, we found out that there was a Halloween market/festival thing happening in downtown, so we walked down to see what was happening! It was very busy (think this is quite a big thing that happens in SLO) and we had fun wandering around the many stalls and looking at all the costumes, picking up bits of thing to eat along the way. We then looked for somewhere to have a beer or two and found a place that Aled and James may well call heaven. It was a big retro looking bookshop, with kitsch decor, lots of chess boards and had a bar/cafe too. We stayed here for a few
hours had a few beers or glasses of wine in my case (and a pot of tea too), perused the books and played a few games of chess, perfect! We then headed back to the hostel to get some sleep before tomorrow's journey.
The next morning we woke fairly early and started the long drive to Yosemite. It was again very beautiful along highway 1, coastal routes are always so fun to drive. A bonus was an elephant seal beach we drove past - we saw the sign, decided to stop and were amazed to see just how many elephant seals we saw - literally hundreds on this one beach. It was a great sight and we were glad we stopped! Around lunchtime we were in Big Sur (copious amounts of The Thrills were being played at this point) and stopped in a cafe for some lunch. The rest of the day was just spent driving - but luckily with lots of beautiful scenery to look at.
After driving all day (pretty much 9 hours) we finally arrived at our hostel, the Yosemite Bug Resort in Midpines just before Yosemite National Park. We we pretty tired and couldn't
be bothered to go out again looking for dinner, so just got a bite to eat in the resort restaurant which was sadly a bit expensive for our traveller budget, but we gave in as the nearest store was about 10 miles away. Interestingly the cafe was putting on a performance of Rocky Horror that night but we were way too tired to entertain anything so headed to bed for an early night.
The next day we woke up early and headed into Yosemite National Park to explore and hike! The drive into Yosemite was full of long windy roads lined with forest and mountains gaining elevation into the park. We parked up and headed to the visitor centre to find out which hikes we could do that day. Our first hike was a popular one called Vernal Fall which took around 4 hours. It was a beautiful hike up to a waterfall with tough steep parts, many different waterfalls running through it and spectacular flora and fauna. We then headed to a sequoia groves (one of the reasons we wanted to go to Yosemite was to see the giant sequoias). It was a short hike but was filled
with many giant sequoias were collassal in size and pretty amazing to see. It's a shame we didn't have more days to explore as there were many other giant sequoia groves but we only had one day here.
We left Yosemite around 5pm - the plan was to drive towards San Fran and find a Super 8 motel aroundabouts half way there. It was already dark before we reached Modesto, a place that looked about half way on the map, we knew there was a Super 8 here but just could not find it - we had no wifi and drove around the town about 5 times with no sucess. Luckily we found a Comfort Inn well within our budget so happily took a room here and headed to sleep pretty soon after checking in.
The next morning we drove the 2 hours to San Francisco airport to drop off the car. Obviously the first thing we spotted when leaving Modesto was the Super 8 - quite amusing after spending all that time driving in the dark trying to find it the previous evening.
We finally arrived at San Fran airport and dropped off the rental car.
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