Yosemite, but no sight of Sam! By Cam

After lamenting my financial contributions to various Las Vegas establishments, it was good to get back on the road and back to seeing nature at it's absolute best. Today saw us heading towards Yosemite National Park and we were filled with great expectations as it had been described as one of the more beautiful of the parks on our tour. We stopped briefly to view some Sequoia's, supposedly the biggest living things on the plant in diameter. To say the trees are old would be an understatement as they were established as adult trees back in the days of Julius Ceasar! The giant sequoia is one of the three surviving redwood species in the world, two of which are found in California, the other, surprisingly is found in China.

We then hopped back on the coach and wound our way down through the park where we stopped and the view took our breath away... majestic Yosemite Valley stood before us, the key feature being a magnificent waterfall known as "Bridal Veil Falls" - so named as when the wind is blowing the water away from the cliff it resemebles a bridal veil.

Yosemite valley we were told was carved out entirely by a glacier which is difficult to comprehend when you see the size of the valley, but that's nature for you!

We continued our drive down to the valley floor and had an opporutnity to further examine the stunning landscape. Not only did we have better views of the Bridal Veil falls, but we were also introduced to some other waterfalls known as the Ribbon falls and then finally the most impressive of them all, Yosemite Falls - the tallest waterfall in the United States. Alison and I had an opportunity to walk to the bottom of yosemite falls and even though standing a good 30-40 metres away, the spray from the falls was still noticably blown our way in a refreshing breeze. Yosemite also boasts another natural feature called El Capitan which is the largest single exposed rock monolith, standing an impressive 1km in height it certainly was an imposing sight, yet there were those we could see that were brave (or stupid) enough to attemtp to scale the giant rock.

After taking what seemed like endless photos of waterfalls and giant rocks, we boarded the coach and leaving the stunning Yosemite behind we started our trek to the next stop - San Francisco.