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Pictures from Yosemite
July 1, 2007 at 7:09 AM
As promised, pictures from Yosemite!I'd never been to Yosemite, which is a major National Park in California that has some really, really big rocks and really, really big trees.
Driving to the Yosemite Valley involves a lot of twists and turns and children saying, "Mommy, I f-f-feel sick, I think I'm gonna..." Fortunately, no one lost their breakfast.
As soon as one goes through the tunnel into the valley, an amazing view appears, and that's where we took a little family picture. Actually, a complete stranger took the picture. What's great about Yosemite is that it attracts all kinds of professional and amateur photographers, so this guy got us from three different angles and really tried to capture what he could.
Once in the park, we hiked several miles up to Vernal Falls, where I handed the camera to my seven-year-old son, who took yet another portrait that I'll call: "Mom in yellow hat, with unprepared smile." I was fine until the hike down, when I had the acrophobic experience of actually looking down (and climbing down!) the rather long, steep set of rock "steps" we'd so easily scrambled up.
I took the picture of the 80-year-old Ahwahnee Hotel, with the great big rock wall in the background. It is very fancy and costs $a-zillion to stay there. It is NOT where we stayed. We stayed outside the park, thus the winding road.
I'd never seen a giant sequoia tree -- these are up to 3,000-year-old trees, and the tallest one at Yosemite is about 290 feet, or 88 meters, high. It's really hard to catch the scale of these in a picture, but you can kind of tell, with us standing by the fallen tree, that they are really huge.
The best picture I took, personally, was of my blue tin cup of chili at a "Cowboy Cookout" that we went on with the kids. We had something even better than an open bar: all the s'mores you can eat. A s'more is an American concoction that involves smashing a toasted marshmallow between two graham crackers, with some Hershey's chocolate in between. The chocolate melts, and the gooey combination is such a treat, you just want, well, s'more. These were double s'mores: two marshmallows, which we cooked on long wire skewers over a campfire, with six squares of Hershey's. My children ate an undisclosed amount, I had two, and Robert, showing a bit more restraint, had but one square of chocolate.
So that's it, a little California dreamin' for your practice break!
Posted on July 1, 2007 at 12:31 PM
Posted on July 1, 2007 at 1:11 PM
I was looking forward to a return to Yosemite.
But unfortunately the WebShots slide show does not work on my Macintosh computer. Does anyone else have that problem?
Posted on July 1, 2007 at 3:57 PM
Posted on July 1, 2007 at 4:25 PM
Posted on July 1, 2007 at 4:53 PM
Posted on July 1, 2007 at 9:13 PM
Ihnsouk
Posted on July 1, 2007 at 9:44 PM
That reminded me that when Safari fails, try Firefox. I generally use Safari for its better appearance (in my perhaps faulty judgement). In this case Firefox works perfectly revealing some beautiful photos.
Posted on July 2, 2007 at 6:02 AM
Posted on July 2, 2007 at 6:39 PM
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