Our Yosemite Stay

We stayed at Yosemite Housekeeping Camp during our 4 days here. It was a cool setup and perfect for camping lite. We had two sites for the 10 of us. Each site was a "tent" of 3 concrete walls a covered seating area with a round picnic table. The tent had one full size bed and one set of bunk beds. To get all of us in there, we also got a cot for each side. It was a snug fit but we managed. We had a couple of bear boxes to keep our food and coolers that served as refrigerators for the trip. We also had two fire rings with a grate on top for grilling or heating up pots. We had electrical outlets on the cooking table and in the tent itself. I had borrowed a bunch of camping stuff for cooking and brought a propane camping stove and a few other electrical things that I knew we could plug in if we needed as well as a couple of power strips to charge cell phones and DVD players. I'm pleased to say that we were surprising good about keeping the technology to a minimum.

During our stay we relaxed, Dad read his books and battled daily with his nemeses, the common grey squirrels that were pretty much running the park. Cute and Fuzzy? I think not, these little guys would boldly enter your food boxes to steal food and would walk on hot coals, literally to grab food scraps tossed there. One morning we left Dad with the kids and went out in search of Mirror Lake. I can't say it's a must see since it is really much more of a swamp than a lake with all of the overgrowth, plus we were all assaulted by the mosquitoes there. A nice hike up to Vernal Falls was taken one morning. Hana and Aubrey became Junior Rangers and were sworn in before we left. Plus there was bike riding and game playing and S'more making and fire building and fishing. Who will forget the time that Bill got stopped by a Ranger for fishing without a license? Luckily he got off with a warning since they weren't using real lures but a big orange plastic fish to play fishing. Bill and HJ hiked up to Glacier Point while Anne and I took the kids and Dad up the easy way - with the cars! But either way, the views were worth the trip.

On our way out, we drove down to the southern gate to check out the giant sequoias at the Mariposa Grove. The curvy road took down poor Kaitie who held on as long as she could. We split ways at that point with Bill and his family going south to Disneyland and So Cal and Jerome and his family along with me and Dad driving north back to the Bay Area.