The Chambers

Day three was a great day. It was a long day, but a great day. We’d booked onto a tour to the Yosemite National Park with a company called Extranomical, who were recommended on tripadvisor. The day was to start about 620 am and we’d be on the tour for about 14 hours, which included 3 and a half hours travel in each direction plus a half hour stop in each direction at a large grocery store for lunch and dinner breaks. So, with the PSP and the iPod’s all charged up we were down waiting outside the lobby at 620… it was cold!

I can recommend the tour highly, it was a long day and we didn’t get to spend a lot of time at each stop but it was a great day out. The scenery was spectacular and hopefully the photos do them justice.

The drive out was for the most part uneventful, but once near the park the road turned very windy and interesting. The turns and twists reminded me of the drive up to Lamington National Park and at one point you could see where more than one panel of a guard rail had had to be replaced because a car had gone through it. It was interesting for the road to then curve back on itself and be able to see the hillside below that part of the guardrail and be able to see the path the car which had gone over had cleared through the trees and shrubs for about 200 metres down the hill. Yuck….

We stopped at a few spots in the National Park and each of them was beautiful in their own way.

The first stop was at a lookout (or vista as they are called here) which looked right down the barrel of the valley. From here you could take in the valley floor, which was covered in what seemed like small, but I’m sure they weren’t, pine trees and you could also see nice and high up to the tops of the granite cliff faces and one long waterfall.

The second stop was a short ride away at the base of one of the waterfalls named Bridal Falls. It was a short hike (I’ll use that word to impress the guys in my team) from the car park to the waterfall base. You could actually walk in from the end of the well trodden path to be nearly underneath the waterfall, but with a little one in tow and the feeling of a disaster movie in the making, we elected to view from a safer distance. I love a good water fountain, but this took it to another level. I’m going to guess the waterfall was at least 400 metres, but will check this later and bet it’s further. We got some great photos here on the “hike” and at the waterfall.

From here we went to the Yosemite Lodge, which is a hotel in the middle of the park. The hotel reminded me a little of O’Reilly’s in its look and feel and it was quite busy coming into the Thanksgiving holidays. We had a lovely picnic lunch by a babbling brook, the only detraction was the low whining sound of a little boy who didn’t want to eat his sandwich (for the record Kylie didn’t make it – we bought it from a local store). From our lunch spot we could see a couple of huge waterfalls, the granite face cliffs the park is famous for, a babbling brook and some other lovely sights. A very, very nice lunch spot indeed and well worth the three and a half hours of bus travel to get there.

After lunch it was back onto the bus and onto the final stop. Kylie really wanted to see the large tall trees which are famous here. We got to see a couple of them and these things are massive! I’m sure they are taller than 30 Makerston Street. The hike (and the word is deservedly used this time) was 1.5 km’s in each direction, downhill to get there and unfortunately uphill to get back at 6000 feet. The area is dense forest; the smell of pine was nice and refreshing for the walk. At the bottom of the walk is a few live Sequoias, which were amazing, as well as an old (now dead unfortunately) tree that some bright spark had cut a tunnel large enough to drive cars through into the trunk and an old dead trunk of a tree which you were able to climb on and INTO! I tried convincing Jackson Winnie the Pooh hid his honey inside, but that didn’t convince him to go in looking. A lovely Park Ranger came along and coerced Jackson into walking into the hollowed out trunk a little, I got a photo and he told the ranger “this is cool, no kid from my kindy has done this before!”. Then we had to tackle the walk back UP to the bus, it was a heck of a walk and I thought we were the last ones of the group so we were walking very hard. Jackson did VERY well, though he did say a few times along the way he wanted to have a long rest and that his legs and even his arms were tired from walking and even suggested at one stage that one of us go and get the bus and bring it to meet him. It was a heck of a way to finish of a visit to a beautiful part of the world.

From here it was back on the bus and a three and a half hour drive back to the hotel to pack up our stuff to be ready to leave.

Day three in the eyes of Jackson:

Over and out, Chris, Kylie and Jacko.