Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Up and down the Yosemite falls!

Our stay in Merced was wonderful even though it was the shortest stay so far on the trip. Our host, Max, and his roommates were very nice people and Marco got to speak some Italian - two of the guys were originally from Italy. We arrived Wednesday afternoon and got some good homemade burgers with Max, his roommate Marco, Marco' s little 3 year old son and two other German couch surfers.
After a well deserved sleep (36 hours in the bus is exhausting!) we were off to the Yosemite National Park with a bus from Merced. It was a bit rainy, but it didn't matter and with a little help from our raincoats we were just fine. We had missed the early bus so our time in the park was fairly sparse. This didn't scare us from taking one of the long hikes to the top of the highest waterfall in North America - the Yosemite Falls.
We started out by filling our backback with food and water and thereafter began the hike.
The trail was long, steep and the rain and snow made it quite slippery, but we steadily climbed the falls. It was so beautiful! Mountains all around us, Sequoias, cliffs, waterfalls, lakes and very few people. Even though the pictures do not give the whole impression of what it was like by far, we managed to take some good photos - check out the Picasa link! We had a few  snack breaks on the trip and made it to the top in 2-3 hours or so. The time was way more than expected, and if we wouldn't catch the last bus we'd get stuck in the Park! Therefore we decided to run down the mountain... Again a  steep, long, slippery run and as we ran past all the people stared at us like we were crazy. The sun was beginning to peak through the skies so the trip down was even more beautiful than the trip up - and way more fun. We came to the bottom in an impressive time of 1 hour witch gave us plenty of time to catch the bus! We managed to film some of the run down with the camera (it is on the Picasa web album, but we should warn you of the quality...).
So to sum up we did a trip that was meant to take 6-8 hours in 4 hours! This didn't hinder us to see all the beautiful nature arround us. But we just experienced a glimpse of the park and the Yosemite is definitely worth coming back to in the future!
We came back to Max's place exhausted and had a goodnight beer before going to bed.
The next day was dedicated to the road once again. - we left for San Francisco witch turned out to be a wonderful, but very expensive place to stay!
Thanks for a wonderful stay Max, and thanks for being able to host our Danish friends the coming days!

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