3. Death Valley - Napa Valley

Fri 19 July
We left our accommodation and entered California, immediately seeing why this part of the world is called Death Valley - it is all so desolate with nothing and nobody around.  We started off the day enjoying taking photos of us standing on the middle of the freeway.

Death Valley itself is the lowest point in North America at 86m below sea level and also the highest ambient air temperature ever recorded on earth's surface was here at 56.7C.  We spent a few hours looking around the various points of interest in the Valley

On the way out the other side (yes we survived Death Valley!!) we stopped for lunch at a famous shop called Erick Schat's bakery in Bishop - a Danish bakery which was packed with people who all had the same idea as us!

From here we went to June Lake which reminded us a lot of the Austrian or Swiss Alps - beautiful blue and green lakes in the mountains.  We spent a few hours here relaxing by the lake, swimming and enjoying the summer heat!  We were staying the night not far from here at Lee Vining in a nice little cabin - on the edge of the mountains and near the entrance to the Yosemite National Park.

Sat 20 July

We headed off into the mountains and immediately started to climb, this trip through to Yosemite from here was definitely a highlight of our whole roadtrip!  When we got up to the Tuolumne Meadows we stopped and did some hikes, we were going to walk right up a mountain but we started thinking about bears and we were walking around in the woods by ourselves so decided to head back down!!  These are alpine meadows located above 2,700m on a large flat plateau - there is a lot of hiking, rock-climbing etc here.

Ellery Lake

We arrived into the Yosemite Valley to the hustle and bustle of trucks, buses, cars and people galore!  We knew the Yosemite was a popular summer destination and it didn't help we were there on a weekend but it was very busy even with traffic jams around the valley itself!

Once we had checked in to our accommodation - a canvas cabin with it's own bear-proof box outside to put any food, we headed out to do some walks on the valley floor to waterfalls etc.

Later in the afternoon we drove up to Glacier Point to a lookout which looks over the whole valley.  We got most of the way there and there was a huge line of traffic backed up.  Eventually I decided to get out and walk as we seemed to be almost there and Rosanna drove the car in the line.  The views, once I got there were stunning.  About 20 minutes later I headed back to the queue and Rosanna was almost at the parking lot with the car so we swapped places and she went to see the view.  A random guy also came up to us asking if we were heading back down to the valley so we ended up taking an American girl down with us (first time we'd done this before!).  Once we got down to the valley there were more traffic jams and we probably spent another hour and a half in traffic before getting back to our accommodation!

Tunnel View - made famous by artist Ansel Adams

Sun 21 July

The next day we had another walk in the morning and then started heading out of the National Park.  Again the scenery was lovely, but not as stunning as the drive in yesterday.  Today we were heading to Napa Valley, not too far from San Francisco.

We only stopped at a couple of vineyards, a lovely European-looking place which was half bakery half vineyard.

We stayed the night at the southern end of Napa Valley at another motel in a place called American Canyon, ready for us to drive onto San Francisco tomorrow.