Days 17 and 18: Mules, Miles and Music

We made excellent time on our way to Yosemite in the morning, got a sweet park in Curry Village, where we were staying that night, then checked out the visitor’s centre. After a bit of a read-up on the flora and fauna of the park, we made our way to the stables. Here's a sample of some of the scenery we saw along the way:



I’d booked us a trail ride, after learning Matt had never been horse riding before. It turned out that we’d be riding mules, since the terrain is a bit slippery this late in the season, and mules are more stable than horses. As soon as we got there, we spotted a goofy-looking white mule with giant ears, and he ended up being Matt’s trusty steed, Henry.



I got the very pretty Judy, who looked more horse-like than donkey-like, and was much less of a guts than the horse I got on last year’s beach trail ride with Kristy and Ashley:



Having not fully recovered from the bike ride yet, we were pretty worried about being incredibly uncomfortable for the duration of the 2h ride, but we went pretty well.









I could feel my knees seizing up towards the end, and it was a bit of a struggle when we initially dismounted, but we straightened up pretty quickly. I don’t think I’m built for horse riding though, because my knees were still twinging more than a day later.

After lunch, we checked into our accommodation, which was a canvas cabin. It was simple, but sufficient for the night, and it came with a bear locker just outside the door. These metal boxes are used to hold all scented things – food, toiletries, drinks – to protect them from bears. The bears apparently know that they can’t get into these lockers, so don’t bother. Food wasn’t allowed in the cabins.

In the afternoon, we went for a walk to Yosemite Falls, and climbed the rocks to get a closer look:


We couldn’t face any more walks after that, so decided to get the shuttle bus back to Curry Village. We had this amazing naturally-framed view of Half Dome from the bus stop:



Once we were back at camp, we showered and got some dinner. Curry Village had a real “school camp for adults” vibe about it, which was both cool and slightly disturbing at the same time. There were several hundred canvas cabins in the village, so you could hear everyone’s conversations, screaming children, cars, etc. I brought ear plugs, but still had a restless night, because I knew we had to leave by 6:30am the next day, for our long drive to Vegas.

Despite the already 8+ hour drive ahead of us, I really wanted to go to a lookout in the morning. From the reading I'd done, it sounded like a must-see for Yosemite. So we took the long winding road up to Glacier Point. This spot took about 45 min to get to, and gave us this fabulous view of the Yosemite Valley:



It was a beautiful spot even without the panoramic views. It felt very alpine, with amazingly blue sky contrasting with the red-barked pine trees:



We left Glacier Point at about 8am, and we saw a wedding party getting photos taken. I don't know if the wedding was later that day or not (it was a Saturday), but there's no way I'd be getting up at 4am on my wedding day to be ready in time for a Glacier Point photo shoot at 8am! Keen bride.

We zig-zagged across the park's few roads, and essentially went across the widest section 1.5 times on our way to the exit. The problem is the exit that gets you to Vegas (south-east of the park) in the shortest time is on the northern end of Yosemite, so it's really not direct. I think it took us at least a couple more hours to make it out of the park! The landscape was ever-changing though, so we had lots to look at on the way, including this crystal clear lake in the high-altitude Tuolumne Meadows:



We also saw some mules (possibly Henry) being transported to a nice comfy paddock for the off-season:



We drove through the Sierra Nevada for 5h or so, and trees were a rare sight. There were only about two tiny collections of houses for 3.5 hours of that drive, so it was super isolated. A highlight was this hilly road, which we reckon they just couldn't be bothered levelling when they built it:



It really felt like a roller-coaster - especially at the speeds we were doing by that point!

We finally made it into Vegas at about 6pm, after fighting traffic caused by a prang on the freeway. Our hotel - Planet Hollywood - was so cool. I didn't get a chance to photograph the lobby, but there were really high ceilings, a black floor, and the wall-to-wall check-in desk was backed by a giant wall of different-coloured panels of light. Green, pink, blue. Added to that, there were chandeliers with beads that draped all the way to the floor, like fountains. The lifts had TVs in the ceiling and played music slightly too loud. So very Vegas.

Here's our sweet room, complete with memorabilia from the Wynona Ryder movie "Boys" (yeah, I'd never heard of it either) and a giant bathroom with his-and-hers vanities on opposite walls:





This was the view from our window - the Bellagio is to the left and Caesars Palace is in the middle. Excuse the reflection from the curtains:



After a quick change-a-roo, we met up with the rest of the Wolfpack - Kristy, Steve, Aron, Cat, Handyside, AJ, Claire, Josh, Trav, Sam and Bridget - in the nearby Planet Hollywood Towers. We had a few drinks, then were picked up by the most ridiculous stretched F-truck, pimped out with a stripper pole, crazy lights and a massive TV screen that played video clips. The driver even handed out beer on the way to the club! I didn't take my camera, but there will be photos on Facebook at some point.

Kristy had done a marvellous job of booking a host to get us into Rain Nightclub smoothly, and he'd gotten us a table in a private area by the dance floor! We had also pre-booked three bottles of vodka for the group, which apparently we weren't allowed to finish completely or they'd kick us out of the area. So we left a couple of cm in the last bottle and continued buying overpriced drinks from the bar. It was a fantastic night - girls dancing in sequinned bikinis on tables, acrobats dangling from the ceiling on silks, flames being shot from above the dance floor intermittently, and just general craziness. We left when they turned the lights on at 4am, and only lost one member of the group in the process (whom we found the next afternoon).

Viva Las Vegas!

Days 15 and 16: San Francisco

We woke up to an apparently very warm San Francisco day, and caught the 9am ferry across to Alcatraz.



This was extra cool because last week we watched The Rock with Nicholas Cage and Sean Connery, so I had lots of points of reference for Alcatraz. Here’s the island with the fog-covered Golden Gate Bridge in the background:



We went on a very interesting audio tour through the cell blocks, where Al “Scarface” Capone, the Birdman and many other “incorrigibles” were housed from 1934-1963. It was extremely windy and cold out there, so we did some star jumps in the exercise yard to warm up:



After we got back to Fisherman’s Wharf and had lunch, we hired a couple of bikes and rode along the waterfront to the Golden Gate Bridge. The fog still lingered:



This was when we realised how lucky we were to have seen the bridge clearly on our way in the prvious day. We rode across the bridge to the Sausalito side, where the air was clearer, then turned back.



Alcatraz winds were only a warm-up for that bridge. It was super gusty and cold, and I was pretty glad to be off it by the end!



By the time we got back to the bike hire place, we’d ridden around 17km – some of it pretty hilly – and our non-trained butts were in pain. Needless to say, we were sitting down very gently the following days!

I had arranged to visit a Pacific Empire Chorus rehearsal that night (about 50min north of San Francisco), so we started making our way back to the hotel. We were going to ride part of the way on the historic cable car, but the line was huge so we decided to cab it. Unfortunately, there were no cabs in sight and calling didn’t help, so we walked and walked and walked, up streets that looked like this:



Eventually we did find a cab, but we were late and only just made it to the rehearsal in time. Matt was tired so napped in the car and got dinner while I was at the rehearsal. Pacific Empire had quite a few members missing from rehearsal, but they were still bigger than Brisbane City Sounds and had a completely different repertoire to us. They were lovely ladies and really fun to listen to. After we drove back to town, we were extremely tired so had no trouble getting to sleep!

The next morning, we decided not to bother with the cable car, and got a head start out to Mariposa instead. This town is just outside Yosemite National Park, and only about 3h drive from San Francisco. We arrived by lunch time, and in the afternoon headed into the southern part of Yosemite, to the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias.



These trees are related to the coastal redwoods we’d seen a couple of days before, but have bigger trunks and are slightly shorter (~94m instead of ~115m, from memory). Although not the tallest or the broadest trees in the world, these sequoias are special because when you add them all up, they’re the largest living thing on the planet. Like the coastal redwoods, they can live well over 1000 years, and are resistant to fire, insects and microbes.



I’d read bad things about parking availability within Yosemite, so we hit the hay early again, so we could leave by 7am the next day.

Days 13 and 14: So many mountains

Dollar Tree was so exciting that Matt and I went back the next day and bought some sunglasses (mine had recently broken), some glow bracelets for Vegas and some batteries. Cheap cheap cheap!

Then we headed further south in to California, through lots of roadworks. Mt Shasta was in our sights for most of the morning, and had a good covering of snow on it:



We stopped over in the town of Mt Shasta for lunch, and remembering my chorus director’s advice, we ate at a diner. I think I got the light option by ordering a chicken burger, because Matt ended up with a plate containing enough food to feed a small family:



I took on the driving after lunch for a couple of hours, on some winding but good quality roads through the mountains. I pulled over after my shift and we swapped, and yet again it was just in time because my god was there a hazard ahead. A good three hours of hazards, actually. There is a major highway from Portland to San Francisco, but because we’d come from one small town and were heading to another, we had to cut across the state diagonally. This meant we passed through shanty towns on tiny horrible roads.

The roads were narrow, bumpy, had chunks missing, were sometimes not even sealed, and I felt a constant fear of death because we were up really high in never-ending mountains and there were lots of blind turns. I was happy to have the GPS, because I could tell Matt which turn was a hairpin and which ones were just normal curves. The arrival time kept ticking up up and up though, which was disappointing, and the glare of the sun on the smeary windscreen added yet another challenge. Eventually, we were rewarded by making it alive to the Best Western in Garberville.

This was a really nice motel. There was a wine and cheese reception in a cute little room overlooking the pool, where I got a variety of cheeses and an enormous glass of a nice chardonnay for FREE! They actually gave up to three glasses to each guest, but one was well enough. Then we sat in the spa for awhile and chatted to a couple of navy guys who were biking up the coast. Room service and some more Law and Order rounded out the pleasant evening.

My reason for choosing Garberville as a stopover was that it’s 7km from the start of the Avenue of the Giants. This ~30km stretch of road winds through groves of giant redwood trees, which average at 600 years old. Some live well over 1000 years and they’re all massive:





We then headed south to San Francisco, and eventually got our first glimpse of the Golden Gate Bridge:



That was pretty cool to drive over. They charge a $6 toll but it’s only charged heading inbound, not outbound, which is smart, and it shaves an hour off the trip into town. Really narrow lanes, but a beautiful old bridge. We later found out that it's incredibly rare to not have thick fog on the bridge, so we were pretty lucky!



After checking into the hotel, we went out to dinner and had a look at the shops. Matt got some cool new sunnies and I bought a shirt, and we saw a historic cable car:



We had an early night, to prepare for the big day ahead.

Days 11 and 12: Lakes and Falls

About half an hour out of Portland, we were following our GPS to a Shell servo when we spotted the holy grail: outlet shops. Unfortunately, Matt didn’t find anything, but I ended up with two pairs of sneakers, a pair of heels and two dresses (bring on the races)!



Our next stop was for some delicious pizza and salad, then we continued our drive to Roseburg. This drive took us through wine country, and we made a bit of a detour to Kings Estate Winery, which I’d read some good reviews about:



The wineries over here seem to charge a fee of ~$5 to taste a set list of wines, which I quite like because you don’t feel obliged to buy anything afterwards. But if you do, you get your $5 back. The bar guy at King’s Estate was nice and swapped the Syrah for a white wine since I’m not a fan of red. I told him I’d never seen a Syrah before, and he said “it’s really popular in Australia and South Africa”. I was thinking I must have seriously been missing something, until he told me it’s also known as Shiraz. Anyway, I tried a nice Riesling which ended up being $12 a bottle, so I got two of those and one bottle of Riesling ice wine. Mmmmm, delicious!

We finished our day in Roseburg, where Matt got a hideous pizza from a place called Abby’s, and I got a roasted veggie sub, which was pretty damned tasty.

On day 12, we did a long drive through Crater Lake National Park. There were so many campsites, lakes and hikes in the park – it would be a great place to live near! We went on a walk to Toketee Falls:



We then continued on to Crater Lake, which is a real natural wonder. It was formed 7700 years ago when a volcano called Mount Mazama erupted and collapsed in on itself. The crater filled with rain and melted snow, and is now almost 600m deep! It’s the deepest lake in the US and one of the deepest in the world. It’s about 10km wide at its widest point, and holds some of the purest water in the country. The water is amazingly blue, as you can see in these photos:





It was pretty cold up there, and we even saw some snow. Another highlight was seeing heaps of these Eastern Chipmunks foraging for food on the slopes of the crater:





That night we stayed in Klamath Falls, a couple of hours south of Crater Lake. Klamath Falls marked our first visit to Denny’s – a diner chain that we’d seen a few times in our travels – and also Dollar Tree, where EVERYTHING is $1. I didn’t really believe it, until I got a bag of pistachios, some chips and a pair of socks for $3. Amazing!

Days 9 and 10: Halfway, Hells Canyon and H&M

We continued along the Hells Canyon Scenic Byway from Halfway to Joseph. Continuing my streak of bad luck with weather, when we finally made it to the Hells Canyon Scenic Overlook, there was too much haze to see much. It was bloody cold too, and soon after we arrived, it started raining. I wasn’t driving this time, but literally every time I have driven, it’s started raining. I am the rainmaker, and Matt seems to deal with all other hazards (wheelie bins, cows, roadworks, cliffs).

Eventually we arrived in Joseph, which is on Wallowa Lake:





The weather had improved slightly, but not enough to warrant going up in the cable car to the top of Mt Howard, overlooking the lake. So we had a leisurely lunch, looked at the little boutiques in town, and stopped in at a milkbar for more refreshments:



Eventually, we were able to check into our room at another B&B. Not as nice as the last one, but we did get a free upgrade and the place was empty yet again. We spent the arvo just chilling out, surfing the net and planning the rest of the trip (well, I did – Matt played Bejewelled).

The next morning, we started the long drive to Portland. We followed a ute with a coupla dogs in it for quite awhile. The little one ran back and forth from side to side, trying to get a better view. We thought for sure he’d get tired but he kept going for ages! Then he smiled at us as we passed him:



Not much else happened on the way to Portland, apart from that we drove alongside a giant scenic lake for ages:



Once we arrived, we went shopping downtown – the highlight of this was H&M, where I bought a hoodie to replace the one I lost somewhere in Utah, and Matt bought an ultra-discounted blazer. We didn’t see a hell of a lot of Portland, but it seemed to be an uglier, more 1980s-stlye construction version of Brisbane, but without Southbank adding any colour. And with a stack more freeways like our riverside expressway – freeway on freeway on freeway. Even with the GPS, we got stuck a few times because of the weird roads and roadworks. We watched more Law and Order at the hotel though, to finish the day on a high.

Days 7 and 8: From tiny cells to wide open spaces

In Boise, we went to the Old Idaho Penitentiary, which opened in the 1870s and operated until the 1970s. This prison was certainly NOT cushy and quite a few prisoners were hung there over the years. Within the prison was a fantastic weapons exhibit, which had swords, guns, etc. from the bronze age through to the civil war and the world wars.







After leaving the penitentiary, we headed north along the Payette River Scenic Byway, encountering much scenery in the process:







With all the scenic byways we’re travelling on, we’ve started referring to many things as scenic, or – as we like to pronounce it – “skee-nik”. For example “That’s quite a skeenik river over there, wouldn’t you say?” “Oh yes, quite skeenik”. We find exchanges such as this to be rather entertaining on our long drives.

That night, we stayed in McCall, which looked like it’d be a cute alpine village in the winter - lots of chalets and little cafés. In summer, water sports seem to be the big thing, since McCall is on Lake Payette:



The following day, we crossed over from Idaho into Oregon, and drove along Hells Canyon Scenic Byway to Halfway. Lots of winding roads on the sides of mountains, plus more hydroelectric plants on rivers. Halfway is a pretty damn tiny town, and our GPS struggled to get us to our accommodation (it’s powered by WhereiS, which adds to my hatred of WhereiS – it has nothing on Google Maps). We finally ended up at a gorgeous bed and breakfast on a working cattle ranch – The Inn at Clear Creek Farm. The Inn was beautifully decorated, as you can see in the photos below:





We were the only guests in the big old house that night, so once our host left us alone (after baking us some cookies and making iced tea), we were free to run amok and take stupid photos:







After this, we went for a wander around the property, which had some plum and apple trees as well as cattle. I was excited by my find of a ripe, non-worm-eaten apple:





The apple was delicious, but dinner that night was an interesting experience. First we dodged some vagrant cows on the way into town (free range cows are common around these parts):



Then, after the shocking revelation that the only restaurant in town was out of pizza, Matt ordered “finger steaks”. These weren’t really fingers of steak – they kind of looked like diced steak crumbed and deep fried, served with a big pile of chips. My cheeseburger wasn’t exactly healthy, but at least it had a piece of tomato on it! My guess is they serve very little that can’t be kept frozen.

As we arrived back at the Inn – after dodging more cows – some kind of creature ran behind a piece of farm equipment in the driveway and all we could see was its eyes reflecting the headlights. We had no idea if it was a skunk or a fox (we’ve seen both on this trip), so Matt kept the headlights on it while I ran into the house like the frightened child I am. Matt made it safely inside soon after, then we proceeded to watch Anchorman before hitting the hay.