Last evening in San Francisco ended in a very unpleasant way: just a few miles before our exit from the highway, our car choked, jumped and died on the side of the road. Poor thing, he didn’t want to start again. Last days were quite a challenge for him - Big Sur with a trailer, ups and downs of San Francisco mountains west of Saratoga, and here he goes, on a totally flat highway… We were ready to call road assistance, but luckily we didn’t - after 20 minutes on Google and a few phone calls here and there later, the car started again. After an evening of research we found out that camshaft positioning sensor needed replacement.
First thought was to do this ourselves. We would have a technical and tool support from people we met here. But it would be quite complicated, it’s not easy to get to the sensor, besides we needed an oil change anyway, so we chose a Vietnamese shop which at first sight seemed not very cheap but after comparing the price to Auto Zone we realized it was the cheapest we would find. It took a few hours next day, so we got to our next place, Stockton, after dark.
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| Our place in Stockton |
Stockton area looks a little bit like western part of our homeland, Mazovia. Green, orchards, if you cut out the Sierra Nevada visible from far and all the wineries it felt almost like home.
Our hosts, Bill and Cathy were so nice they let us use full hook up, so we could take a normal shower, use microwave, charge all the electronics (we are like Pavlov’s dogs, we see electricity, we plug all we have). Bill is retired electrician and now is making some extra money fixing rvs. Too bad we had everything working …
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| Our hosts |
Next morning unexpectedly we got up at dawn (which for us is around 7am) and we were on our way by 9am. Three hours later we arrived at Yosemite National Park. We entered by main road from the west, "120". Unfortunately we didn’t get to go on the most picturesque part of it, through the park towards east as it was still closed for winter (sometimes even until early June). Anywawy, getting to Yosemite Village was unforgettable.
Steep road goes down to the valley. Just after entering the park there’s view for huge part of the valley and a rock called Half Dome over it. Few more miles of winding road down and we entered Yosemite valley.
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| Road to Yosemite |
We found there all you can expect from a place visited by 3 million tourists per year: a highway. One two-lane-road is on one side of Merced river, the other one on another. All the way down this road there are parkings, you can stop, go couple minutes away to lose all the cars and buses from view and imagine that you dive into the wilderness untouched by human. Of course there are lots of other humans around and most of them probalby are thinking of the same thing.
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| Half Dome |
We were lucky anyway. It was end of April, middle of the week. In high season, especially on weekends there are traffic jams and lines of people waiting to take pictures on the viewpoints. You can look for a parking spot for hours. We found it without problems and we could enjoy even the easy trails without too many people around.
Yosemite Village looks a lot like Grand Canyon Village, although it’s prettier and more "wild". In Grand Canyon everything except for a few historical buildings was made of concrete, plaza with shops looked like in any other suburban town. Here even the newer buildings are built to match the area. But here the buildings are in a very heart of a valley, and in Grand Canyon they were further from the rim. In both places there is of course free shuttle bus with stops by viewpoints and trailheads.
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| El Capitan |
We walked for a few hours. We went to Mirror Lake and to lower waterfall, we saw a few smaller falls too. We saw quite an interesting (as usually in those kind of places) exhibition about how the valley was formed (first the granite rocks deep under the surface of earth was formed, then it was uncovered by erosion, next the valley was shaped by water, tectonic movement and finally by glaciers). And now we can enjoy a classic and one of the most famous glacier U-shaped valleys. There was also a film, but it was quite boring.
We started walking at noon and just a few walks later we realized it was 7 pm. It was getting really cold so we jumped on a free shuttle to get back to the parking. Overall impressions? Waterfalls and huge rock formations - Half Dome, El Capitan, Cathedral Rocks - it’s all beautiful. But on the other hand grey rocks seem too Polish, too familiar. It was not as exotic and different as rocks of Arizona and New Mexico. In Grand Canyon we could not believe our eyes, we were so amazed it was easy to forget the crowds around. In Yosemite we walked for 7 hours and it was just enough for us.
When we came back it was time to decide what is next. Our host, when we told him we were thinking about visiting Napa and Sonoma for a wine trip suggested to try local wines, as they are much better and cheaper. As it wasn’t easy to find a place to stay overnight near Napa and we really enjoyed our stay in Stockton we decided to take his advice. Unfortunately our wine tasting day was at the same time laundry/cleaning/shopping day so it was after 3 pm we realized we have just couple hours left to find a winery. Bill helped us out suggesting one nearby with free tasting.
Wine was pretty good, although the best one (in our humble and not expert opinion) was imported from New Zealand where Delicato Family decided to expand with their business. Besides, we don’t have sophisticated taste so the one we liked the most was the cheapest one, Pinot Grigio, and we bought it to spend a nice evening with our hosts. We talked a bit about life under California sun, we asked for advice for next part of our route and we were ready to go. We decided to go back to "101" and touch the ocean again from our favourite "1", this time in northern California.
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