Holidaying with Joanium: Yosemite Day 2

For a place of granite rock and snow, Yosemite National Park sure has a lot of red tones. I'm glad I worked out how to use our digital camera in time to capture the tones. In fact, as you can see from the pictures, I added a greater splash of red to the park.

We hiked up towards Upper Yosemite Falls but stopped at Columbia Rock. It was a very tortuous track, lots of climbing, very tiring. Jason was amazing, leaping up rocks to create shortcuts. I was shocked when mum followed him, even cheerfully scrambling over rocks that Jason hadn't thought to approach. She was upright while Jason tripped! My mum is cool.

Dad and I stuck to the path. I think this is an indication of our squareness -- we follow the rules.

Mum called, "Joan! Come here! We can get a photo of you with the deer!" It was so close. I had never been that close to a wild animal before. So of course, I poked its rump with my drink bottle.

"Joan! Don't do that! What did you do that for?!" they all gasped. I shrugged. Dunno. Seemed like a good idea.

The views 1000 feet up above the valley floor were breathtaking and worth the tiring climb. I'm not yet a good enough photographer to capture it.

That afternoon, we drove to Fresno, a stopover town before we drive across the Sierra Nevada desert to Las Vegas. Fresno is a weird place. I call it "Bunnings City" because every single store is on the scale of Bunnings, the mega-hardware stores of Melbourne. Even the donut stores are huge.

Everything is sprawled out, islands of retail enclosed by six lane roads. It's awful. Nothing is on a human scale. I didn't see a single pedestrian. There is no way you could walk here -- you have to drive. It's the most unwalkable neighbourhood I can imagine, an environmentalist and community-advocate's nightmare.

Two days into this roadtrip and I have learned that my family is funny, entertaining and clever but sometimes annoying. Mum gets silly, dad is sometimes slow, Jason is moody and I'm short-tempered. Perfect, eh?