Yosemite

The year of the national parks

It all started with a 3”X2” card.
My friend D came down from Seattle to spend the Christmas holidays with us. It was snowing heavily and often in Seattle and she wanted to escape that. So our promise of good weather in California, and all the goodies her family sent for her from India through me was enough to lure her here.
After all the Christmas parties were over, we decided to go to Yosemite. This was D’s second visit and the initial tour of SF was already completed in her first visit. Thus Yosemite. Plus it would also be an opportunity for me to visit the park which my husband had visited 13 times (!) the previous year. I had to see what it was.
So on the 26th morning we started for Yosemite. We woke up, bundled ourselves and left. The drive was a nondescript one apart from the road being very beautiful. Now I was back from India a week ago after attending my brother’s wedding, and right after coming back I had been hosting and attending a lot of parties. My system was still following the clock on the other side of the world and amidst all the festivities I wasn’t exactly in the pink of health. Amidst all these I didn’t eat anything since morning. We had a stock of granola bars, but I didn’t feel like eating them. We stopped for lunch around 2 pm in a small town where they had some greasy cheesy sandwiches of which I could barely eat half.
We reached Yosemite around 3 pm. At the entrance the ranger asked us if we’d like to have an annual pass. It would cost us $80. My husband thought for a moment and got it. if we visited 4-5 national parks, it would be cost effective. We hoped that we’d at least do that much, if not more. Although at that point it was our second national park visit. The first one was in mid February to Crater Lake. You can’t blame us though. It was our first year of marriage, and then in the summer we went to Mexico and Cuba, and then parents and relatives came over and before we knew summer had passed.
At the entrance we were told that chains were required. So we pulled in to the chain installation area. We had taken a friend’s car because our car was a two-seater but the chains we had were for the two seater. Our car was a rear wheel drive and the tires were much more fat than the front wheel drive. So the chain was installed but it was kind of loose and it made a gut-gut sound all through which was annoying.
Inside the park everywhere we looked it was white.