Brian Kirsten

Honeymoon Day 2-5: Yosemite

April 30, 2004
We left Sonoma to head over to Yosemite National Park, a 4 hour trip southeast from Sonoma. I did a whole lot of driving around California the last time we were there, and I like driving around new places so I pretty much enjoyed a majority of the drive. Nearer to Yosemite there were a lot of "white knuckle" sections, lots of curves with cliffs just off them with little or no railing. Also there is absolutely nothing about 100 miles outside of Yosemite so stopping for lunch was a little tough. We go to the hotel in the mid afternoon, we ended staying in the Yosemite View Lodge, a rocks throw from the main entrance to the park (which is really not true, the main entrance they are referring to is just a gate with "Yosemite National Park" sign attached to it, it's miles before you're really into the park). The room was pretty standard fair, although it was funny to me that there were signs in the room begging people to conserve power, and there was a hot tub in the room big enough to hold a family of four. Doesn't it take electricity it heat water? Anyway the other cool thing was the balcony which opened out right to the Merced river, ah the sound of running water all night, very calming. Another thing I found humorous was the amount of liquor sold in the lobby store of the hotel, definitely an indicator of a lack of things to do around the hotel (and in that general area) after dark. We decided to head into the park while we had some daylight left, and it really is amazing. I mean you must see to believe amazing. We're from Florida, in Florida there are no mountains, at best you get some hills and most of those hills have ants crawling out of them, so seeing mountains like this was a treat. I'm not a huge "outdoor-sy" person, I haven't been really on since the boy scout troop I was a member of broke up. So you can imagine my surprise when we stopped at the first waterfall and I bounded up the rocks like Carroll's white rabbit. It's truly a magical place, peaceful, quiet, with "nature" smells I wish I could bottle up. On our second night we had dinner reservations at The Ahwahnee Dining Room which is in the The Ahwahnee, a hotel that's in the center of Yosemite Village, and has stood there since 1927. It kind of gave me a sort of The Shining vibe to it, but it was still very quaint and the food was excellent. The only other thing I could really mention about it, was during dinner we were probably some of the youngest people there. It was filled with blue-hairs! I guess that's a big place for retirees to hang out if they have oodles of the "cash money". The only other thing truly interesting about that night was the drive back. Now The Ahwahnee is 15 miles from the entrance to the park, so we obviously had to drive 15 miles back to the hotel. It was dark. Dark... literally like you've never seen before, because you couldn't see three feet in front of you. Oh and there were a whole lot of curves and that whole danger of falling off the cliff thing I mentioned before. Oh it was such a treat. Anyway we finished off the last day running around while my new wife took a ton of pictures. I got to see a coyote, walk pretty close to El Capitan, and got to walk on a horse-shit covered trail. All-in-all a great part of the honeymoon. Day 2-5 of Honeymoon: Completed

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