The least direct route from San Francisco to Yosemite
That night we had dinner in Fresno at an unusual restaurant chain I’d never heard of, before continuing north on CA-41 towards Yosemite National Park. Fingers crossed that we’d be able to find a place to stay. Stopped at the first (and last) city before the park: Oakhurst; stopped at the first hotel we saw, which advertised free wireless internet (hooray!), and which apparently had the only vacancies left in town; posted my first dispatch from the road and crashed, alarm set for early.
At some point north of Fresno, it became a lot hillier and woodsier, but we hadn’t seen the transition traveling in the dark. So our drive towards and into the park Monday morning was a welcome departure from the flat Central Valley of the previous day.
Approaching from the South
After driving through a very long and rugged tunnel, we emerged at the classic “tunnel view” of Yosemite Valley towards Half Dome.
San Simeon is a weird place. Basically it’s a bunch of hotels on either side of CA-1 just south of Hearst Castle. We found a room for Saturday night but kept wondering, why does this place exist? I couldn’t believe it was all for Hearst Castle, a State Historical Monument run by the California Parks Department.
So the next morning we drove up to see what the fuss was all about. The place was a madhouse. Literally crawling with people. On a Sunday. At noon. At a historic landmark. We actually had trouble finding parking. I thought families had barbecues and went to the beach or the mountains on Labor Day weekend. I didn’t expect such groundswell for an educational activity. Suddenly San Simeon made sense.
There was the hair of a chance we could have gotten tickets for a late afternoon tour and watched a movie about the castle between noon and then, but Stephanie and I looked at each other and realized that wasn’t at all how we wanted to spend the rest of the day. We wanted to keep moving, and we didn’t want to end up staying in San Simeon another night.
So I give you, dear reader, Hearst Castle as seen through a viewing telescope, which is as close as we got to it.
Leaving Pebble Beach, things finally started to get interesting. And by interesting I mean the view from CA-1 forced us to stop the car every 10 minutes to really appreciate what we were seeing.
This rugged view seems to evoke the coast of Scotland or Ireland
Today Katie and I took a trip around West County, first to the excellent Renga Arts in Occidental (cause she’d remembered it from an earlier post) and then out to Jenner, where the Russian River meets the Pacific.
Sunday was also beautiful, so after a jaunt around downtown Santa Rosa and some purchases at the Barnes and Noble, we headed off to Point Reyes. We stopped at the Marin French Cheese Company on the way for a quick snack and some beautiful views of the countryside.