Yosemite – Day 1

We woke up a bit late this morning.  11AM actually!  My philosophy is if you sleep that long you must have needed it!  I think we did.  So we skipped breakfast and went straight to lunch.  Duh.

We headed over to the main visitors center.  We have never really spent much time there so this was a welcome relief that we were not rushed.  In a bit, a naturalist walk/talk was starting just outside the door.  We decided to join up.  The talk was very enjoyable and the walk was very easy.  However, 3 months after the fact, we cannot remember the specific subject.  We walked across some meadows and one of our fellow attendees pointed out some deer in the grass (see below).

Deer

 

After the walk was over we walked to the nearest bridge and took the requisite shot of half dome.

Half Dome

We went back to the main village area, looked around a bit and went back to the trailer.  I had heard of someone talking about going to Glacier Point to watch the sunset over the valley.  This idea intrigued me so we headed out to do so.  As we got on 41 and headed to the Tunnel the traffic was backed up.  I was not sure if we would make it to Glacier Point in time (it takes about 1 hour to get there).  An additional problem was that I didn't have any headlights!  What?  That wasn't going to work.  We pulled over into the Tunnel View parking lot.  I started to investigate the headlight problem.

It turns out that I found the problem.  I added a special harness that senses when the lights are turned on and then powers the headlights directly from the battery.  It is supposed to help headlight brightness but it uses two relays.  One relay is for the low beams and one is for the high beams.  The low beam relay had failed.  I swapped the relays so I had low beams but no high beams, which is workable.  However there was absolutely NO WAY to get to the sunset viewing now.  So we just sat at Tunnel View and watched it.

Sunset from Tunnel View

With a bit of sadness we went back to the campground but decided to go to the evening ranger program.  The subject was bats.  Again, very informative.