Flutterby™! : Yosemite & more

Went to Yosemite on Friday evening, arrived late, set up camp (in the coolest spot in the Upper Pines, in between two rocks so that we had almost no sound in the tent), had a prolonged breakfast with the group we were hanging out with, and then biked down to Bridal Veil Falls and back, stopping along the way at whatever looked interesting.

There was a lot of snow this winter, so the cliffs were covered with rivulets and falls tumbling down the granite, spraying white and reflecting the bright glare of the sun in narrow streaks.

My past few treks to Yosemite have been weighed down a bit by the camera, but this time I resolved to carry only the newly repaired little one, and to keep the shots to vacation pictures, snaps of us. Mostly I kept to that.

The bike was clearly the right way to experience the valley in the high summer. The traffic in a few places was astounding, and since the highest speed limit in the valley is 35 and in most places it's 25, even when things were flowing at the limit we weren't any slower than the car. Not that getting anywhere fast was a priority.

Sunday morning we pedaled up to Mirror Lake, then back down to Yosemite falls, before wandering back to camp, packing up, and getting back at a reasonable hour.

On the way back we got distracted in Oakdale Escalon by a couple of old cars on a side street and discovered "The Horseless Carriage Garage, Don & Lillian Ritchey, proprietors", which looks like Don Ritchey's shop and obsession, containing everything from a Stanley Steamer to a 1917 or 1918 Caddy with numerous things in between. We were feeling a little pressed for time, so we only chatted for a little while with the man fiddling with the 1911 Maxwell in the driveway, we assume that was Don, and we've promised both him and us that we'll be back to explore and chat more.