Yosemite Valley

At some point in our lives, OilMan and I went away for Memorial Day weekend and swore we'd never do it again because of the crowds and the traffic. We kept our promise until this weekend when we were honored to be included in Anne and Harold's family to honor their 50th wedding anniversary. They themselves hadn't realized when they made the bookings a year ago that it was Memorial Day, the most notoriously high tourist traffic day in Yosemite Valley.

Why does the entire world decide to visit Yosemite Valley on Memorial Day weekend? I suppose the reasons are as varied and as creatve as our own….

We were well put to the test today when we set off with Anne and Harold for breakfast at the Wawona Hotel, a charmingly rustic, white painted frame building with a wide veranda, a forty five minute drive from the valley.  The dining room was short staffed and very busy, but despite all that, our breakfast was good, the waiter was extremely attentive to the fact that the Haskins' grandchildren have serious allergies, and very apologetic that we had to wait. 

We took a shuttle to the Mariposa Grove of Sequioia redwoods and joined the hoards for a walk as far as the Grizzly Giant, one of the biggest and oldest trees in Yosemite. Anne and I had no difficulty persuading our menfolk to cut the walk short since we were all feeling the effects of the previous day's misadventures.

It took us three hours to drive the last nine or so miles to the hotel. Well, a small portion of the time we were driving; most of the time we were sitting still in a parking lot of cars stretching for as far as the eye could see. 

The scene began to remind me of pictures from the third world as people literally abandoned their cars by the side of the road and walked. We took special note of an Indian grandmother, wrapped in her sari, grimly marching down the road all by herself. A pick-up full of bicycles in front of us, pulled off the road, the people got out, unloaded their bikes and rode off through the forest. A man walked down the road pushing a stroller and carrying a screaming infant that couldn't have been more than two months old. I was acutely aware of my growing need for a loo. It was what our son Tim would have called "a perfect storm of misery".

 We had several things to be thankful for during this ordeal...the fact that Anne and Harold were in the car with us, the fact that we were driving OilMan's hybrid which turned off whenever the car wasn't moving, and the world class scenery rising above the fray. I could only pray that peoples' eyes were turned heavenward as I bolted from the car, praying that OilMan wouldn't drive off without me if the traffic started moving, and hid behind a tree when the loo was not forthcoming. 

We missed tea at the Ahwahnee, but by the time we made it to the turnoff to the hotel, where we saw the Indian grandmother who had made it on foot as fast as we did in our car, were turned away by an incompetent young traffic warden, and found our way via a service road marked "no unauthorized vehicles" to the hotel, we were ready to go straight to wine…a recurring theme.