On the Road to Yosemite

It was an especially quiet night at the Lighthouse and I slept really well considering I was in the girls room. I woke up and Annie was already awake and starting on the bacon. I found the coffee and started that brewing. At one point Anne was standing by the back door with a big smile on her face. I asked her what was up and she said that she was experiencing the most amazing thing. Of course I wandered over and found myself with the most wonderfully fresh and clean smell of ocean. The seabreeze was blowing in just perfectly. I smile and said, yeah, that's nice. Anne shook her head and said, "no you aren't getting the full experience, wait a second and you'll see!" Just then, the smell of bacon cooking in the oven washed over me. Oh My God! It was the perfect combination. Even though I was very pre-coffee and it was about 6:30 in the morning, I went and grabbed my camera to capture this moment.

So before breakfast of pancakes, bacon and coffee was ready, I went out with my cup of coffee to gather some photos. While I have every intention of coming back here, I wanted to try to capture some of this morning for painting reference photos and my memory at large. It was super quiet and there were only a few workers wandering around. It wasn't until I came back into the house that I realized I was wandering around in my pajamas!

After breakfast, we stripped down the beds, got dressed and packed up and checked out by 10am. Our earliest start time to date. we wanted to be sure to have as much time as possible for our trip to Yosemite given the limitations of the Rossi Rules of the Road combined with traveling with 3 cars.

After a quick grocery store stop to pick up a few overlooked items, we headed East. The plan was to stop for fresh fruits and veggies at roadside stops. The day was beautiful and the driving was fun. We stopped a couple of times, but never found any veggies we liked. Ah well! There were a few scenic vistas and we all stopped to enjoy them. We did a little musical cars and I ended up driving halfway with HJ and then switched at a gas stop and picked up Anne who ended up driving the last part of the way into the Park.

We got into camp around 5-6 pm, picked up our bed stuff a few chairs and got settled in. HJ cooked another big dinner and we made due with a little cook surface area that looked like with would collapse at any moment. It didn't matter because we were finally at Yosemite!