Our Southwest flight (our new favorite airline) left on time about 6:30 a.m. from Detroit Metropolitan Airport enroute to our first stop – Denver. While we stopped in Denver we were the only passengers continuing on to Oakland, California so we were able to sit tight on the plane while it took on new passengers in Denver.
Once we arrived in Oakland – a few minutes early at 10:30 a.m. – we headed to pick up our rental car only to discover that my promised American made car had turned into a Nissan Versa, which prompted a slight delay as I argued with them over the reservation. They offered me the only other American made car they had – a Chevrolet Traverse – for an additional $400, which was not in our budget.
So off we went in our Nissan, which is a gutless wonder, but it successfully got us around the 1,800 miles we put on it over the next 18 days. It would have been a few hundred more, but I couldn’t imagine packing that Japanese roller skate with four people and luggage and climbing the 6,200 feet to South Lake Tahoe so we borrowed my cousin’s car – a Toyota sports utility vehicle. More on that part of the trip later.
Over The Hill
After leaving the airport we headed “over the hill” on Highway 17 to Santa Cruz to visit my son William in Aptos. We arrived there about 12:30 p.m. and William was nice enough to put on Joan’s soap opera “Days of Our Lives.” Then we hiked the mile down to the cement ship on the beach at the State Park near where William lives. It is a beautiful hike and the weather was ideal.
Then we headed to Capitola for dinner at Zelda’s, which has become kind of an annual tradition with William, Joan and I. They have a wonderful Shrimp Louie, but I opted for some real food after a long day of travel.
After dropping William off at his home we headed to our hotel – the University Inn and Conference Center in Santa Cruz – for a well deserved night of rest. After checking in we realized that more than half the hotel is used for housing long term students at the University of California at Santa Cruz. We later learned that a few more of the residents are mental patients who are monitored to make sure they are properly medicated. It was an interesting place to stay and everyone co-existed quite nicely.
Next morning I was up early as my body and mind stay on Eastern time for at least a week whenever I travel out west. Had to go to the desk to have someone open up the hotel fitness center at 6:30 a.m. (sign said it was open at 6 a.m.) but obviously I was the only one planning to use it that early.
Back at the room we got ready for a full day of fun with William. We picked him up about 10 a.m. and headed to the Roaring Camp and Big Trees Railroad Park in Scotts Valley. This is a beautiful place with a steam train that winds up the mountain into the Redwoods. I had not been there since the boys were very small in the early 1970s. Again, the weather was picture perfect and we had a wonderful ride up – and down – the mountain.
At Bear Mountain, Joan was excited to touch a 3,000-year-old Redwood and the conductor on the train gave us an interesting talk on how the Redwoods in that particular area were saved from loggers around the turn of the century by an early environmentalist.
That evening we drove out onto Santa Cruz pier and had dinner with William at Stagnaro’s, another long standing establishment on the pier.
The next day we stayed with William until early afternoon and then headed back over the hill to have dinner with my granddaughter Brittany and her boyfriend Wade. We had a nice dinner at The Elephant Bar in Campbell and it was joy to see how grown up and mature my oldest granddaughter has become.
Back to Danville
After dinner we continued our journey over to Cousin Cynthia’s in Danville where I was going to drop off Joan for a few quiet days with our cousin while I headed back over the hill to visit my other son, Timothy.
As always, Cynthia was a wonderful hostess in her beautiful home. The next morning we were up leisurely and then we headed out to a nearby reservoir and walking trail for a 3-mile hike. I know this sounds repetitious, but the weather was once again gorgeous.
After cleaning up I headed back “over the hill” to have dinner with Timothy, his girlfriend Heather and her son Jakob. We ate a very nice restaurant within walking distance of their apartment on the Capitola pier.
One of the more exciting parts of this trip I had been anticipating was planned for Saturday morning. After losing 100 pounds over the past 13 months, I told my son Timothy, a surfer and dedicated backpacker to plan a challenging hike for the two of us.
A few years ago he led a hike with me and Brittany up in the Big Sur Mountains. That hike was a 10-mile journey that we did in about 7 hours, including a two-hour lunch stop in an idyllic spot along a mountain stream.
This time Tim planned a really ambitious all-day, 30-mile hike on the Skyline to the Sea Trail. Wasn’t sure how I would do, but Tim told me we had an out half way through at the Big Basin Redwoods Park headquarters if we needed to abort the hike.
I slept on a sofa bed Friday night and Tim and I got up at 5 a.m. and Heather drove us to the trail head where we started the hike down about 6:15 a.m. The weather was foggy and chilly when we started. We were the only ones on the trail.
The Hike
It took us about five-and-half hours to travel the first 16 miles to the park headquarters where we had some trail mix and fruit for lunch. Tim was kind enough to check with me to see if I wanted to abort the second half of the hike and have Heather pick us up there. But I was feeling good and said let’s keep going.
On the way down the mountain, we started at 2,600-feet we also had a number of up sections (a total of 1,300-feet we would later learn). From a few vantage points we could see the ridges of mountains that we would be crossing to get to the ocean.There were warning notices that part of the trail we were going to use was washed out, but a detour was available.
So about noon we headed back on the second half of our adventure. When we arrived at the part of the trail that was posted as closed we started off on the detour, but met a nice lady who told us that the original trail was still passable and to follow her. In just a few minutes we arrived at the washed out portion of the trail which was on a steep slope, but we were able to use some make shift hand holds and foot holds to cross the 30-foot washed out section and get back on the original trail. That saved us at least an hour and an extra 3-miles of hiking.
About two hours in we came to Berry Creek Falls, which were swollen greatly due to recent rains and it was beautiful. It was here that we parted company with our unofficial trail guide – Brigette – and headed on the trail down to the sea.
We crossed West Waddell Creek on a make shift bridge made of steel I-beams and found the rest of the trail was a wide groomed, but unpaved fire vehicle road. Most of our up and down hiking was now over, which was a welcome blessing.
On the final leg of the hike we followed West Waddell Creek and then passed through some farm fields and then a field full of golden yellow California poppies.
And then there it was, the ocean and the conclusion of our 10-hour hike. They were having a wind surfing contest at Waddell Beach, but the weather was very windy and chilly and we were not dressed for that so we huddled in a bus shelter waiting for the 5 p.m. arrival of Heather and Jakob at the pre-arranged time and place for our extraction.
They showed up about 15 minutes early and we drove back to Capitola to get cleaned up and go to dinner. We ate at Jakob’s favorite restaurant – Applebee’s in nearby Watsonville.
After dinner I dropped off Tim, Heather and Jakob and headed over to William’s house for the night as I had planned to go to his new church with him in the morning.
It was at this time that I realized that the hike had taken its toll on my two big toes and even now, three weeks later, they are black and it appears that I will lose both toenails due to the lack of proper footwear on the hike.
While I was on the hike, Joan and Cynthia spent some time on the Bay Area Rapid Transit system taking the tube under the Bay over to San Francisco. Cynthia and Joan also did some wine tasting at Livermore wineries.
In the morning, William and I went to his new church, St. John’s Episcopal Church of Aptos, and I met his many new friends. It was a wonderful service and following that it was back to see Tim, Heather and Jakob for lunch before heading back over the hill again to see Joan and Cynthia.
We walked to a local Mexican restaurant where I had one of the best burritos I had ever had.
It was Mother’s Day and Tim, Heather and Jakob were hosting Tim’s mother, so I headed out about 3 p.m. so I would be back in Danville about 5 p.m. for dinner.
My aching feet and legs put me to bed early on Sunday night. During my absence Joan and Cynthia went to the wineries in Livermore and took the Bay Area Rapid Transit train to San Francisco through the underwater tube and visited the incredible Farmer’s Market on the Wharf.
On Monday, we kind of lazed around Cynthia’s house and then went to see “Something Borrowed” at a local Dansville theater.
Yosemite Bound
The next great adventure of our trip was taking Joan to Yosemite, a place I went several times as a child, but a place she had never been. Most of my trips to Yosemite were in the middle of summer so I was eager to see the park during the “wet” season when the falls were running full.
A number of folks had told us that the heavy snow pack and weather had contributed to a very healthy snow pack melt and that the falls were incredible this year. They were not wrong.
A four-hour drive brought us into the Miner’s Inn in Mariposa where we checked in about 12:30 p.m. After checking in we headed to the park, a drive of about 40-minutes. The road along Highway 140 runs next to the Merced River and it was as full as I have ever seen it.
Part of the road just outside the park has been covered by a rock slide and there is a one lane detour on some temporary bridges that require traffic to wait for about 15 minutes while the opposing traffic gets to use the lane.
During my previous visits to the park, traffic was always an issue. Now the Park offers a central parking area and an efficient system of free shuttle buses to get visitors around so there are not traffic jams and parking issues at the main sites.
So we parked and walked to the Visitor’s Center where we learned that there was a 3 p.m. tour in an open vehicle that would take us to several vista spots. When we arrived the tour was sold out but they put us on a waiting list and we were successful in squeezing into the tour after everyone else had boarded.
The park was as beautiful and magnificent as I had remembered as a child. After the tour we took the shuttle to the Ahwanee Hotel where we learned we were not properly dressed for the main dining room and didn’t have reservations anyway so after eating at the Ahwanee Bar we headed back to our car and made the 40-minute trip back to our hotel at the Miner’s Inn. We watched the Red Wings beat the San Jose Sharks on our room television. A good day all around.
Next morning we were up early and headed back to the park arriving about 10 a.m. Again we parked in the central park area and took the shuttle bus to the foot of the trail for Vernal Falls. This is a trail we always took when I was a kid. Unfortunately my recollection of the trail was that it was pretty level. I couldn’t have been more wrong. It was up-up-up to the bridge below the falls and then, of course, down-down-down to the trail head.
This was hard on Joan as well as my barely recovered feet from the 30-mile hike just a few days earlier. The scenery was beautiful though and we decided it was worth the pain. On the way up we had seen a trailer for a Sierra Rescue Squad and on the way down we found them practicing rescue techniques on the headwaters of the Merced River which has just passed over Vernal Falls.
We stopped and watched them diving into the water and going from one side of the river to the other.
We visited the Nature Center at Happy Isles and then caught the shuttle bus for the Mirror Lake trail. Again, this was a trail that I remembered as being flatter than it was, but it was nowhere as steep as the Vernal Falls trail.
Mirror Lake used to reflect the magnificent Half Dome like a mirror, but in recent years, the park service has discontinued the dredging that used to keep the lake deeper and now it is merely a wide stream and the reflection is no longer there. But it was fun to relive my youthful days of camping in Yosemite and our visits to Mirror Lake and Vernal Falls.
The shuttle bus took us back to the Visitor Center where we took a load off our tired feet and watched a movie about Yosemite.
Following the movie we headed back to our car and the trip back to Mariposa. We had dinner at ?? which was in the historic downtown of Mariposa.
Pam Joins the Party
On Thursday, we left Mariposa and headed to pick up my sister Pamela at the airport in San Jose. We almost were an hour late when I dallied in Gilroy for about 40 minutes getting a photo CD of our Yosemite pictures due to a glitch in my Tom Tom GPS device which was off by an hour because of a daylight savings adjustment I forgot to make when I plugged it in.
As it turned out we were right on time, but Pam’s baggage took a while to show up at baggage claim so we spent about 30 minutes dodging and out foxing the curbside security folks at the airport.
But with Pam aboard we made the 40-minute drive back to Danville where we caught up with Cynthia. After lunch the ladies went shopping downtown and I worked on my photos on Cynthia’s computer.
Friday morning we got up and walked the reservoir again and took some family photos there. We returned home and all got cleaned up and about 12:30 p.m. we headed out to Auburn for a visit and dinner with my sister-in-law Barbara.
The trip up was uneventful and we arrived at Barbara’s home about 3:20 p.m. We visited for about an hour, took some photos and then with Barbara’s neighbors – Bill and Ronnie – we headed to the Lake of the Pines Country Club for a very nice dinner.
Unfortunately, Joan became ill during dinner and felt like someone had punched her in the kidneys, a condition that hovered around her for much of the next week.
Time for Tahoe
After dinner we said our good-byes to Barbara and started the trip to South Lake Tahoe. We arrived after dark to the Marriott where we had a beautiful two bedroom suite that included a kitchen. Tired, we all went to bed with plans to do some sightseeing in the morning.
Joan was feeling a little better in the morning and decided to head to the nearby Nevada casinos for a little try at her luck. The Marriott is so close to Nevada that I wondered if we weren’t crossing the border every time we went into the bathroom. Literally it was a two-minute walk from the front of our hotel to the Nevada border and the casinos are right on the border.While Joan was in the casino Cynthia, Pamela and I walked to the beach at South Lake Tahoe and took some photos. Then we walked back up to the casino area and found a large contingent of bicyclists waiting for the AMGEN – Tour of California race on Sunday. Professional teams were set up in the parking lot behind the casino and we visited a number of business booths set up nearby.
A bicyclist let us pick up his bike, which was a super lightweight carbon fiber material. We were told some of the bikes cost $15,000 to $20,000. These guys were serious. Unfortunately Mother Nature would spoil their fun the next day.
Pam’s childhood friend, Julie Leconte, who lives nearby in Placerville, California and we made plans to meet her and her husband for dinner, which we did. We ate at ?? a nice restaurant on the South Lake Tahoe Marina.
After dinner, Julie’s husband went to play poker and the rest of us went to see Eric Burdon and the Animals at Harvey’s in Nevada. It was a great concert and Eric celebrated his 70th birthday at the concert complete with a cake.
It was time to get out of Dodge. On the way around the lake we felt badly for the many folks who had camped out all night so they would have a good spot to watch the bike race in the morning. As we left they were still waiting as the decision had not been officially made or announced.
The snow was light until we got over the summit on Donner Pass and then it got heavy, and then things got worse when traffic slowed to a stop because of an accident. Californians are a little on the novice side when it comes to driving in snow so we lost about an hour sitting in traffic as the California Highway Patrol cleared the wreck in front of us.
We had a wonderful visit with Cynthia’s daughter, Lindsey, her husband Keith, Lindsey, and their beautiful new son Grayson in Sacramento.
Wine Tasting and a visit with Jan and Norm
After our wonderful stay with Cynthia we head up to the Napa Valley and enjoyed a day wine tasting in the valley. We stopped at several fine wineries and eventually joined a mail wine club so Joan can continue her California wine tasting throughout the year.
One through Napa Valley we headed over yet another windy hill to visit our friends Jan and Norm at their beautiful home on a golf course.
We had a nice dinner out at the local casino.
Over The Hill again
After the visit with Jan and Norm we headed back to Santa Cruz for a final visit with the boys. We took William to a local attraction called “The Mystery Spot” where water inexplicably (thanks to clever carpenters) runs uphill and tall people become short people.
But it was fun to spend time with William, Timothy and Brittany.
Finally we headed back to Cynthia’s for a final day of laundry and preparing for our flight back to Michigan.
On the way home we had an unscheduled stop at the San Ramon Regional Medical Center to take care of a medical issue that Joan had been suffering for several days. They fixed her up with a prescription and the problem resolved itself in a few days. The bills continued to come all summer.
A wonderful three week visit to Jim’s home state.
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