28/8 I woke up in Bishop, California

Exciting day today as we are heading to yosemite! we woke up in bishop which is the second small town we came across after getting out of the death valley (the first one seemed really nice, and they even had a small mcdonalds with paintings outside portraying a cowboys branding cows by burning letter “M” on their asses, quite unusual for a chain of fast food.
Shane felt like driving so we did another 50 or so miles to bishop, picking a property brochure on the way. So today in the morning, whilst waiting for the washing to finish, i was scanning through it and the “small village” with a cute mcd, turned out to be an expensive ski resort in sierra nevada, with prices ranging from 300.000 usd for 3bed 2 bath, to 6-7mln mansions. That would explain why there were 6 hotels per square mile in the town centre!

Today we are heading to one of the most amazing national parks on the planet. It’s here that the giant “drive through” sequoias are. I remember them from postcards received as a child from my family living in us, and i always thought : “that’s awesome, it looks surreal”. Well, here I am thanks to my amazing boyfriend, exploring the gorgeous side of life.

We were driving most of the day, and vie gotta say: the park is huge!! We made it half way after around 2 hours of driving. There are hoses, mules, donkeys, if one feels like riding, or a two hour trip with a dude explaining where did all the rock formations come from.
I don’t think words do it any justice, so instead of yapping, I am posting some of the pics here:

Whilst pretending to be Jesus and “walking” on water in the stream (freezing cold but strangely refreshing feeling), I lost my flip flop. Bizzarely I felt more guilty contaminating this crystal clear water with my smelly flip flop, then I felt sad loosing some footwear.
Leah run quickly along the river to save it, but the water was to rapid. Even though the flop rescue action was hopeless, running alongside the water, whilst jumping over the branches and rocks barefoot felt somehow ..liberating.

With one flip flop in hand, we got back in the car and headed to the stables to have a look at “renting some horse power”. Or a donkey.
I didn’t think this was the right place to get the information, even though there were horses outside, it looked almost like a private ranch.
Me and Leah, both bare foot and picture ready, both wearing long, black summer dresses, that could easily be mistaken for an evening attire, with me in full make-up.. (I came to the conclusion that even with all those people here, must be over a thousand in yosemity village, if I was to run out of mascara, there would be no one to help me. Well, same goes for a hairbrush and lipstick, it feels slightly hippy here , but in a good, yuppie kinda way).
So where was I.. horses, right! We managed to find a woman dealing with animal-related enquiries. She looked at us from the dusty feet up, and looked slightly confused as to why the hell we are so out of place, walking like a pair of freaks trying not to step in horse shit scattered around the front yard.
- “Nothing available today, next one tomorrow at 8:15am”. Erm.. AM?!??!? “We’ll call you”

We drove to our sleep destination, Yo village. There was one very busy hotel, with a queue of cars in front, so we thought that’s a good sign. Plus a valet parking in the middle of a national park, between bears and deers!! Awesome. Well, it was awesome till we got the price of almost 500 usd with no breakfast. Seriously?? I get it, there is no competition, so you can charge whatever, but 500?? It’s not Chateau Marmont!!

We drove next door to the campsite where one could get a tent with beds in, planted on the ground, with no linen or a sink, for 100usd, but that was slightly on the rough side, so we drove around for a bit longer and found an awesome camp side, with 3 beds, a safe, an anti-bear food box (yup, bears here are very inquisitive and if they can smell anything , they’ll go for it.
So we are all locked up, zipped up, some dude next door could as well be a bear as he is snoring like an animal.
Shane cannot sleep and sits next to me, cleaning his teeth with an open condom wrapper… romance is in the air..