One Lucky Girl: Weekend in Yosemite

Pat and I drove to Yosemite Friday morning. Rather than go to the valley we went up to the Tuolumne Meadows area. Pat loves the sights there, I like them okay, but I really prefer the valley. There is just something about Half Dome that speaks to my soul. Sounds corny, but it does. On Saturday we drove across Sentinel Bridge and I told Pat that after we were finished doing everything else I wanted to go back and take a picture from there. It's my favorite spot to view Half Dome...has been since I first when to Yosemite when I was a little girl.

I thought you might enjoy seeing the pictures from our trip, so I am sharing!

This is the view on the drive up to Tuolumne Meadows from the lookout area.

I wanted a picture of Pat, with Half Dome in the back.

It's that little blip up to his right.

This is Tenaya Lake,

still on the way to Tuolumne Meadows.

It is frozen!

At first when we saw people on the lake

we thought they were

CRAZY!

As we drove down a ways we saw that people

were ice skating on it,

and playing ice hockey!

On the way back Pat thought we should get out and go on the lake also.

Walk on water? Me? I don't care if it's frozen or not...

not a good idea!

Pat thought it was a GREAT idea!

I decided I needed to at least try it...

so I went about 15 feet onto the ice.

(I was hesitant since I fell recently

and am still recovering...

or you could say I am a chicken, either works.)

So, I guess we are crazy too!

After we finished driving there we checked into

our hotel...Yosemite View Lodge,

which is right outside the park

From there we drove up to Glacier Point,

to see the sunset.

We got there around 4 PM.

It was 36 degrees outside.

Just a tad cold!

We stayed there for an hour,

and then it began getting dark.

It was really cool to see the sunset,

Half Dome gets kind of a purple haze,

it's really pretty and the pictures don't do it justice.

Me and Half Dome

Purple haze...you can kind of see it.

Sunset on the way down to the valley.

It was gorgeous.

Story - Pat is known in our family for losing his glasses. On the way down to the valley on Friday night he got out of the car to take his jacket off, because it was getting warmer. We stopped at the Sentinel Dome turnoff, he got out took off his jacket, noticed his glasses in his pocket, put them on the top of the car, got back in and drove off. He didn't want to ruin his glasses by sitting on them, so he was trying to be careful, and then promptly forgot about them.

Oh, and he didn't realize until 45 minutes later when we were pulling into the Yosemite Lodge parking lot, where we were going to get dinner. He was pretty bummed about it, I told him not to worry, he had planned on getting new glasses anyway.

So, the following morning before going to the valley we drove back up to where he had lost them. We had a slight hope that someone had found them and put them on a rock. But as you can see from the picture above, it was pretty dark out, it was doubtful that anyone would find them. Still, we wanted to solve the mystery of what happened to his glasses (which were in a glass case, by the way).

When we got there we parked and started looking around the area where we had been parked the night before. Pat and I walked down a little ways, to the opposite end of the parking lot, and he found, in the snow, a lens, that worked for his eyesight. (he has really good eyesight, but bi-focals for reading) Then, a little bit further he found the Costco cleaning cloth that he had in his case. We never found the case or the frames, but we found that. It was pretty odd.

At any rate, here is the picture we took

on our trip back down from the Tunnel lookout area.