Yosemite Camping Trip

I'm back from a weekend excursion to Yosemite National Park.  I knew it was big, but wow it was much larger than I expected!  We left around 5:15am in the morning...waking up at 4am is no bueno.

Our (Hubby, friend, sister-in-law and myself included) campsite was luckily only a few miles from the entrance we took, which is nice because it could have taken over an hour if we chose the I-5 route vs. our much more scenic route.  The campsite we chose was really awesome!  I was afraid we'd be cramped into a tiny space and have people surrounding us, but we managed to fit our 6-person tent, hubby's sister's two person tent, another 2-4 person tent for the pups and three cars.

Miles loved the pup tent!

Our site had people on either side, but behind us was just pure wilderness.  There were so many bear warning signs up, and each campsite came with a metal storage locker for your food and toiletries (they said to even lock up your chapstick!).

When we finally settled in, it was around 1pm, and we decided to go explore.  We stopped at the visitor's center and caught a quick five-minute speech from one enthusiastic park ranger about the area we were in and learned that at our high altitude of 10,000 feet, our bodies were producing way more red blood cells.  The day after we leave camp and leave the elevation, we're supposed to be 'super humans'.  Our baby was a super human for a day!

After the visitor's center, we stopped and found a trail that was up against this gigantic mountain/rock.  We decided to venture around, even though no dogs were allowed (shhh), but we managed to run into nobody.  It was a nice 30 minute hike, and then it was off to look at more sites.

I apologize for no pictures...hubby is the photographer in the family/group, so he took all our photos.  But we got to see the "Half Dome", which is this giant rock mountain in the shape of half a dome.  Then we stopped a few more times before it started getting late, so we headed back to make dinner.

I said this about a million times while we were camping, but Missy, hubby's sister, won the gold star for best camper out of the group.  She brought all of our meals for the entire weekend, and Friday's dinner was steak tacos.  They were SOOO GOOD.  Every meal she made was incredible.  Having her there was clutch, and it was really fun hanging out with her outside of Washington!

Saturday was our exploring day, and we were mainly in the car driving to each destination...like I said, Yosemite is so big you have to drive a lot.  We didn't do much hiking, just getting out of the car, taking lots of photos, looking around and hopping back into the car.  At the end of the day, we stopped at this big beautiful lake close to our campsite and played with the pups while our friend swam around.  We got to play with them for about 20 minutes until a friendly park ranger said we had to stop and get the dogs out...at least they got to play a little bit.  Lesson learned though--Yosemite is definitely not dog friendly.

Courtesy of our friend Daryl-Tenaya Lake

We left Sunday morning and headed to Bodie, a large ghost town about 25 minutes northeast of Yosemite.  I wish it wasn't so hot that day, or else we would have lasted a lot longer; but the dogs were overheating (Coltrane kept pulling me into shade areas), and we had to pay $7 each and drive 3 miles over this terrible rocky-dirt road.  But it was really neat to see such a historical town, along with a creepy 'curse' if you took anything from the buildings/structures.  They even had a binder full of letters from people returning things they took and hoping their bad luck would be lifted.

We got home around 7pm on Sunday, and my favorite part about that was taking a nice, long shower.  Camping is really fun, but it was so nice being home again.  I think baby had a good time in the womb as I fed it such delicious food and plenty of s'mores!