Yosemite 2017 Part 2 of 2 – Journal Time
Welcome back! Here is the final part of our Yosemite adventure, enjoy!
06/06/2017
7:07 PM
Dear Journal,
Wow this was a long day. We drove into Yosemite and ended up coming out of the same exit. Then we traveled back in and ended up coming out of the west entrance. My brother talked to a forest service worker at the gas station and he told us to check out Manteca. Well I should really start from the beginning. I would say that I woke up but that would be pointless, because that is how every day has started for every man since the dawn of creation. So I got dressed while my mom made breakfast. We had bacon, eggs and toast.
My brother and I spent the entire morning annoying our dad with a song by MC Punjabi. And then we continued to annoy him all day as well 🙂
Mom also prepared sandwiches for lunch today, and as usual they were the best sandwiches ever. After every thing was ready we ended up leaving just after noon. We made our way back to the park and ended up seeing El Capitan among many other things. We even walked over the Sentinel Bridge. According to a sign on said bridge, the worst flood ever recorded in the park would have covered the bridge in about 4 feet of water!
Once we were back on the road – actually scratch that. We also saw the chapel, I didn’t get a picture of it because I couldn’t get a good angle on it and I didn’t want to get sunburned. You see, we had already been out in the sun for probably 20 minutes and I forgot to bring sunscreen with me.
So anyways, we made our way towards the northeast side of the park, only to lose track of our distance and end up at the visitors center… Yeah this reminds me of the GPS debacle (spelling?) of our west coast road trip. A 14 hour drive turned into a 24 hour drive, because the further we went the longer our further away further away our itinerary became…
After we arrived at the visitor’s center I decided to take another look at the map. I realized that we had traveled significantly farther I realized. expected. So we decided to keep traveling back along the same road, expecting to arrive at the correct destination this time. Well we ended up driving through the same ranger station that we entered the park by.
At this point we were all hungry and ready for a rest stop, so we continued down the road to the local Chevron station and general store. We took this opportunity to eat our sandwiches and buy some drinks. While we were stopped my brother saw a forest service vehicle and asked the driver how to get to the Northeast side of the park.
He said that at the section of the park was currently covered in roughly 20′ of snow. He recommended driving to Manteca instead. So we re-entered the park and made our way to route 120. Along the way we saw plenty of waterfalls and drove through a number of tunnels. And we finally succeeded in getting someone to honk back in a tunnel!
We made our way to the West entrance that leads to Manteca. After driving for about 30 minutes we arrived at a rest stop called “The Rim of The World”. The view was so amazing from there. I skipped over a big chunk of our trip just now, that’s because we were just driving through a big section of forest that had obviously been burnt by a forest fire recently. After The Rim of The World we looked looked at the map and realized that Manteca was out by Modesto. Way further than we initially thought. So we just decided to drive back to the campground. That drive took forever. We drove roughly 50-60 miles and it took about one hour and thirty minutes. The road was super curvy, we’re talking about 10 mph hairpin turns.
My parents actually remember driving on that road under the same circumstances on our last trip 15 years ago. So we got back to the KOA and I started writing this entry. My mom made hot dogs on the little charcoal grill. That’s pretty much it. If anything exciting happens before I go to sleep I’ll let you know.
Sincerely,
Greg
And that was my last entry for the trip because the last day was pretty uneventful. We just drove back home through central California. So this concludes my first series of posts on Journal Time. Make sure to let me know what you like about the posts and what you don’t like! For now this is Greg, over and out.