Yosemite

We couldn’t do our planned route as we didn’t take consideration that it was their winter period and obviously there was snow over the mountains in Yosemite National Park. So we had to re-think our route as we were planning to drive from San Francisco (Frisco) to Las Vegas via Yosemite and Death Valley but now we couldn’t get over the mountains from Yosemite to Death Valley. It meant we had to drive an extra two hours to get to visit the Yosemite Valley Village. It took us about 5.5hours to get there from Frisco. The weather forecast wasn’t very good and we had some snow warnings in place. We finally got to the Valley at 3.30pm so we had time for a few photos and a quick coffee before driving down to Bakersfield for the night. 

Once we got up to the mountain 6000ft it started to get dark, rainy and the deers started to move more across the roads. I had said that I would drive from the Valley to Bakersfield to give Steve a break from driving…but was now regretting that, we went so high on these very windy roads!!! I got through it though and we saw some pretty awesome views on our way before it got dark.  Unfortunately we didn’t get to the Death Valley on this trip, as we were going to go there on way back from Las Vegas but we had a late night on our last night in Vegas and didn’t want to rush anywhere in the morning.

The Death Valley and Grand Canyon which was another place we wanted to visit will have to wait for the next time as it was all snowed in and we weren’t insured to drive in snow with our hire car and didn’t have snow chains.