© 2011 notworkrelated - David Rutter & Helen Roscoe. All rights reserved. notworkrelated_usa_road_yosemite_36

USA – Road Trip – Berkeley / Yosemite – 15th/16th October

We met the boys at the car collection point and picked up our 7 seater Dodge Caravan, oh yeah! It was pretty spacious inside but that soon started to disappear when we loaded our bags into the trunk! We said our goodbyes to Heather and Jamie and off we went on road trip number two. We took the route north through the city, over the Golden Gate Bridge (4th time lucky!) and made our way across the bay area to Berkeley. Having already popped there a few days earlier we thought it would be good to visit the campus on a nice sunny day!

There was an occupy Berkeley demonstration taking place along with a farmers market and an open day at the uni! We walked around the campus and then decided to make tracks via a Trader Joe’s to stock up for the journey. Our route was to take us through to Mariposa which is where we would base ourselves for the night before heading off to Yosemite early the next morning. So we drove along Interstates 580 and 205 and then highways 99 and the 140 to Mariposa.

In total the joinery took over 5 hours and we arrived in Mariposa at around 6pm to check into the very affordable and friendly Mariposa Lodge. We ate locally that night at a good grill restaurant called The Charles Street Diner, it was full which is always a good sign but had ran out of many of their specials. The burger as Dave put it was excellent.

So with an early night we set our alarms for 5.30am and got up the next morning in the dark, it was a quiet start until around 8am. It took us 2 hours to reach Glacier Point where we’d read about some of the best views in the valley, plus we wanted to beat some of the tourist traffic that would be piling in for the day. To put it simply Yosemite National Park is one of the most beautiful around, we managed to explore as much as we could in one day! If it had just been Dave and Helen touring around we would have arranged to camp and spend at least 2-3 days there but as we had an agenda we had to be pretty quick with our day. We drove down into the valley and had a little walk to the Yosemite falls area before making our way through the park and out the other side.

We enjoyed a few band-inspired group photographs throughout the day as well as fantastic views all round! The brakes also had a little bit of a battering on the journey! Must remember to downshift manually in future! After a half hour stop at Mono lake on our way to Bishop we eventually got to our motel at around 7.30pm and set out to grab some Mexican food before once again getting an early night. The next day we had Death Valley to look forward to!

(Leica M9, Summicron-M 50mm f/2.0, Leica 90mm f/2.8, Zeiss 18mm f/4 ZM processed in Lightroom 3)

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One Comment

  1. emily
    Posted 4 Nov ’11 at 7:10 am | Permalink

    Image 33 lovely…. many lovely images although I am beginning to worry about you Dave. Are you not enjoying yourself or are you just being cool. x

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