California: Day 2 - Yosemite National Park

Hey There!

I’m so excited to be sharing our photos from our California trip. My husband and I received a free trip to California from Shaklee so we jam packed it with as much as possible. Here’s Day 1: Pacific Coast Highway, Highway 1 to Big Sur in case you missed it.

We left our little motel room really early and headed out for a breakfast hike. (I know this place looks shady, but it was honestly one of those adorable little road side California motels…and lets just say it was by no means cheap! It was expensive and we didn’t even have TV, lol). We packed muffins we bought from the motel’s cute little store the night before.

This post may contain affiliate links, which means I’ll receive a commission if you purchase through my link, at no extra cost to you. Please read full disclosure here.

Literally about 100 meters in to the hike we had to cross a rocky steam. The water was freezing!!

Shortly after the steam we came to the meadow – and this is pretty much what most of the hike looked like before arriving at the ocean. There happened to be a bobcat standing on this path that Clayton saw but took off before I could get my camera out.

Once we got closer to the ocean the terrain changed a good bit. We were amongst these huge rock hills with lots of brush. Did you know that Mountain Lions live along the coast in California?? My eyes were peeled to see one but we never did 🙁

We finally made it to the ocean and were greeted by this sign:

I know this looks destroyed and maybe not even very pretty…but…I am really being honest when I saw it was absolutely gorgeous and totally freaky at the same time! It was a cove surrounded by high mountains and large jutting rocks out in the water. The clouds were down very low and it was very cool and windy yet totally peaceful. We were the only ones there, although others had been there at some point because they built shelters out of the driftwood.

One of the shelters.

While we were eating our breakfast totally alone in this cove a Park Ranger came walking up from the path. I was a little creeped out because of course he was armed and so it made me worried. Turns out he was actually looking for two people who had spent the night out in the cove. It’s illegal to do so and is very dangerous. The ranger told us that any kind of earthquake or tremor out in the ocean (which is very common in this spot) causes these massive tidal waves to wash up on the shore and would have literally killed the people, there would have been no way out for them. Yikes!

On our way back we saw a deer and even a rat (yes, really, a rat just eating something on the trail, he was actually kind of cute).

After breakfast we hopped back in the car and hit the road to Yosemite.

We stopped in Madera, CA for lunch. I’ll be honest, it was like we were in Mexico and it was awesome!! Every single person at the restaurant spoke Spanish, the TV program was in Spanish…and even the menu. Thankfully the waitress also spoke English so I had to ask her what everything was because I had no clue!

Rather than selling pop (soda for all of my southern friends 😉 ) they homemake their own “waters”. I ordered the strawberry water:

Clayton ordered Aqua de Jamaica which is a Hibiscus water. Both of the drinks were really good!

The burritos we got were totally different than ones I am used to. Clayton always raves about Mexican food out west being different but really good!

We arrived at Yosemite and headed straight to Mariposa Grove to see the Giant Sequoia trees!

24 hours with no kids so I needed to act like one 😉

After a couple of hours hiking around Mariposa Grove we hit the road again traveling in Yosemite to the Valley. The curved mountain in the distance here is the famous Half Dome. The National Parks System allows people to hike it however, only 300 are allowed per day so you have to apply for a permit 2 days prior to the day you want to hike it. Then there is a lottery drawing 1 day before and that’s when you find out if you’re allowed to climb it or not. Unfortunately, we did not get permits which was a bummer (but we made up for it on a different hike).