Category Archives: Trips

A week away from things

Posted on by

In light of the recent events in our lives, we thought we should just get away from it all for a week. We didn’t want to go far as we had to be back for Thanksgiving and then some stuff in SoCal. We headed up CA41 to Oakhurst (about 90 miles).

We have passed through Oakhurst numerous times and stayed there about 6 years ago and we really like this small little town. We were there to relax a bit but not just sit around the trailer all the time. It was starting to get a bit cold in the mountains.

Since we were so close, we had to take a drive through Yosemite. We stopped at the Mariposa Grove of Sequoia trees at the southern entrance to the park. Another location that we had driven through so many times but had never taken the time to stop. This time was different, we got out of the truck and took a hike.

It was not a very long hike, we weren’t up to that. We walked up to see the Grizzly Giant Sequoia tree. Along the way we did a selfie by a downed Sequoia:

I tried out the portrait mode on my iPhone during a break in the hike:

We finally got to the Grizzly Giant:

It was interesting to hear visitors commenting on how amazing and huge these trees were. Coming from living near, and visiting often the trees of Sequoia/Kings Canyon National Parks, we have seen more and bigger Sequoias but many visitors only hit Yosemite.

We continued down to the valley floor and saw the devastation of the southern part of the park due to the forest fires from the summer. It was surreal.

We got a couple of pictures from Tunnel View:

We concluded the day with a nice dinner in Mariposa and completed the loop back to the RV park.

Oakhurst has one movie theatre, which is OK with us. We always like to go see the movies. This one does it a bit differently. They did not sell, per se, an individual movie ticket. They sold you a ticket that was valid ALL day. You would watch any of the 4 movies for this one price. However, they also offered a monthly movie pass for one or a reduced monthly pass for two. We took the monthly for two. So we ended up seeing 3 movies for $35. About $6/movie/person. Not bad.

One movie we saw was “Dawn Wall”, a story about a pair of climbers that were the first to scale a specific wall on El Capitan. Seeing the movie made us stop during our Yosemite loop to see if anyone was climbing El Cap. There were a few and it was fun to see.

On another day I decided we should drive the Sierra Vista Scenic Byway. I had heard about this scenic route and thought it would be fun. It was a good way to kill a day but would have been better in the spring. It amazed me how many roads are built throughout backcountries everywhere, this is no exception. There were very nice paved sections, rough paved sections, partially paved sections, and complete dirt. There were some very beautiful portions and vistas. Some odd rock structures, and a few lakes:

We also ran into some ‘issues’ on the road:

Near the end of the loop, we came across the Geographic Center of California. This is always the kind of thing that I love. So I walked up and became ‘centric’ for a bit:

Since the holidays were coming we headed back to Visalia bidding Oakhurst a fine adieu!

Hawaii!

Posted on by

Roxie has wanted to go to Hawaii for many years and was trying to coordinate her side of the family going also. I finally told her we should just schedule a time and they could then have a target to shoot for.  We chose a time that covered Roxie’s birthday, our granddaughter’s birthday and our anniversary, it was also pretty close to my birthday.  We also decided to take our granddaughter with us.  Unfortunately, it was not conducive to take the Airstream.

We scheduled 5 nights on Maui.  After a very cramped airline flight, we arrived in humid Maui.  Here is the view from our hotel room near Lahaina.

On our second day, it was Paige’s (granddaughter) birthday so we surprised her with a Zipline tour.  She and I both went on the lines.  We had a good time but I got stuck on one of them.  I came in very fast, even after following the hand directions, I hit the limit of the line, smacked the springs and shot back down the line.  Stuck in the middle over a canyon.  It was not traumatic, I just worried about taking up time from the others.  Here we are on top of a hill:

Another ‘Hawaiian’ tourist thing to do is go to a luau, which we did also:

One day we drove the road to Hana.  We got a photo by a grove of bamboo:

We had the same airline flight back, Roxie wants to go first class next time!  Our son picked up Paige from SFO as she had high school orientation the next day!  We stayed to visit our other grandchild (Atlas) for a few days.

We had a good time in Hawaii and will go back sometime to a different island.  I think we would like to avoid August as it was very humid and our last day was somewhat impacted by a tropical storm to the south of the big island.