Yosemite Glamping

Did someone say *glamping*? 

Welcome to our third Yosemite summer vacation! We decided to really take the fun up a notch this year and splurge on an RV. *Someone* was *supposed to be* potty trained and so it seemed like a great idea. (Refrigerated food and the occasional hot shower was nothing to throw rocks at either.)

Yosemite was great, as always. Every year it's all very predictable - the perfect weather, the tolerable crowds, the selection of activities. This year though, water levels were very, very low due to low rains this past winter. Yosemite Falls was completely dry (although it usually runs out in late August anyway), and all the rivers down to a trickle. Mirror Lake, our favorite spot, was more like a desert this time. :(  If we don't get more rain this winter, we will likely take a break from Yosemite next summer as those water activities are always the highlights of the trip.

I didn't do the best job capturing the magic of the valley I'm now realizing, as I look back on three days of photos, but these are some little highlights of our time:

I have to laugh at all the fuss I made over the suggested list of items the RV rental company provided. 'Pizza stones', 'butcher knives' and 'curling irons' were some of the items I scoffed at, but the iGrill?! Oh yeah, we definitely need that out in the wild!

Here was a typical breakfast for us: English muffins toasted on the skillet, buttered and jammed (blackberries just canned this week!), peaches and blueberries. We would then wash it all down with a long family bike ride through "Nature's Great Cathedral".

Little Miss on her new DeeLITE bike with her new helmet. The whole get-up cracks me up.

Mr. Noodle refuses to acknowledge the potty but was a superstar on his balance bike. The kid is going to graduate to peddles before he's even out of diapers.

I've always been a die-hard romantic for stories of The Mother Road - so I had to try this stuff.

Little Miss trying to get close to a deer.

I'd say she nailed it.

Our view of Half Dome from a little shady spot along the river where we swam and snacked.

OK - I'm probably going to go to hell for this next shot, or at least have to face interrogation by CPS, but let's be fair here - this is not nearly as bad as smearing your child's head with honey so that you can get a cute shot with a bear, now is it?

I know, I KNOW! Don't feed the animals!!! But really, these animals were so brazen, something tells me they've had a life of tourists feeding them long before we ever rolled our 26-foot mobile home into the valley. I wasn't going to kill her dream of a tea party with woodland animals.

OK - another naughty parenting moment - camping with iPads. But really - who's parent would not have used one of these in our day had we been more wired in the 70's. No more guilt here because while they were doing this at 8 o'clock...

...we were outside doing this. :)

A big thanks goes out to Galen Clark, Abraham Lincoln and John Muir for making this family vacation possible. As Daddy said, "We owe so much to those men. Without them this valley would look like Las Vegas."