Side trips

Our adventure has gifted us a car rental and some time with regular beds!!

We decided to head to death valley first and show catrina the hottest place on the planet, and it didn't disappoint, even at late afternoon it mustered a cozy 118F welcome for us, which is about 48C for those who prefer metric.. Toasty.. Surprisingly there are people who live in death valley, not to mention animals, has to be a rough existence

Our next journey was to travel north to yosemite.  It was a fun drive, and a steep car trip up the mountains to get over the passes into the park.  Yosemite is basically a valley, with roads along the upper and lower parts. Our first day we stayed in the upper, and visited Merced Grove with some huge trees, not redwoods, but huge all the same.  It got late so we fled to a nearby town and slept, then returned to the park the next day, this time hitting the lower valley.  It is a beautiful park and well worth the time to visit.

After Yosemite we headed to San Francisco, our plan was to see the Muir woods but that was denied.. Turns out this year they implemented a system to require reservations, which we didn't know about, all was not lost though as the Muir beach was open to us and was awesome, it'd been months since we saw this much water. It was to cold to get into, but still wonderful to be around.

We then headed into the city to see some touristy stuff, the full house houses, called painted ladies, the crookedest st, and fisherman's wharf.  The sea lions were there, but if anyone wants to visit Alcatraz on the summer best book months in advance, we'll have to come back another time for that too..

We finished the day with dinner at a seafood place before retreating back to the hotel and hot tub. 

After San Fran we headed to Reno to drop catrina off at the airport.