We woke to a beautiful day at "June Lake" just south of Yosemite, the view from the balcony of our room was quite beautiful, we were overlooking the lake & some mountains, the fishermen were all out in their little boats.. quite idyllic, and to cap it off the desk clerk called us "kids" .. what a perceptive lady.

Today was Yosemite day, we left the hotel at about 9:30, got some breakfast in a small place in town then headed out on the long drive to the other side of Yosemite, we had planned a route that had minimal backtracking, which was tricky as were starting east of the park and wanted to end east, the main road runs east west, so we had the choice of driving back & forth through Yosemite, or going the long way around the top then down the west side and back through the middle, this option added 150 miles to the day but thats what we did.
 

The route was marked on the map as "scenic" and boy they didn't lie.. we marvelled as the mountains loomed above us with snow on their peeks, then as the road meandered up to 10,000 feet (oh, for a Rufffle-o-meter<tm>) and through the trees we found ourselves at a similar height to the snow.. and soon enough we'd found a spot to park that allowed us to scramble over to a drift.. yup, standing on snow! we messed about in the cold under the rich blue sky for a while before continuing..
 

It was sunny this morning..

big ol' waterfall..

After some more winding roads & gorgeous scenery we made our first stop in the park proper at the Visitor centre, but it was crammed with tourists (we're not tourists oh no.. we're "travellers".. <ahem>. so we didn't stay, instead we drove round to "Glacier point" for a quite stunning view of the mountians.. if you're ever here take a look at "Half Dome" the famous peek in the middle of the range.. Homer Simpson or what?

This travel report makes it sound like we did nothing today, but so far we'd been driving through the park for about 5 hours, 5 hours of scenery overload.. leaving Glacier Point we drove through the  middle of the park, trying not to let the SUV's RV's and slow coaches in Honda Civics bug us.. (we failed) we left the park at about 6pm & started the long drive to tonights hotel.. our favorite.. Furnace Creek, Guess where we'll be at 9am tomorrow morning..

We passed the time on the long drive discussing how great it would be if "Bishop" the town 3 hours down the road had a Taco Bell (it did) and playing "Who the hell am I then, eh?" our favorite travel game.. todays answers were: Bryan Ferry, Daevid Allen, Steve Hillage & Nancy Spungen, I only guessed the answer to Bryan Ferry because we added some rules to the game (named "The Bishop amendment" as that's where we thought of them...) basically you can swap 5 guesses for a giant clue..  I just realised some of you reading this have no clue what "Who the hell am I then eh?" is .. er..  sorry. :)

Leaving Bishop we saw some strange lights in the sky, imagine a bright dot about the size of a very large star with a beam spread out 180 degrees pointing 45 degrees down to the ground with a bright green streak running through it... the whole thing was massive, very bright & slowly moving upwards.. it took ages to fade, naturally we assumed it was a UFO, but then that's what people do around here isn't it? See UFO's I mean..

We drove through Death Valley in the dark, the roads were empty, dark & scary but it did give me the chance to use the full width of the road & take the 'stang up to 120 mph..   big fun when you can't see 50 feet in front of you..  and thats where today ends, back at Furnace Creek, 90 degrees outside in the middle of the night with just the chirrupping of the grasshopers to keep us company... bliss.

Pool first thing.. then off to Vegas to have dinner with Craig & drop RK off at the airport..

G'nite!

Next day