Road Trip, Day Nine

 

See the end of this post for info about this photo.

Today was the final day of the road trip with my daughter Becky. We started with breakfast in Lee Vining, Calif., where we had stayed the night, and then went to nearby Mono Lake.

Those are limestone deposits called tufa towers in the water near the shoreline.

Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) was associated with our previous two destinations, Virginia City and Carson City, and today we learned that he came to Mono Lake! He wrote about his trip to Mono Lake and his other adventures in the wild west in his 1872 book "Roughing It."

We departed Mono Lake and took the Tioga Pass to Yosemite.

Most of the world enters Yosemite from south to north; the Tioga Pass took us there via the northern entrance. It was spectacular!

 

This was my first trip into Yosemite, so when I first saw Half Dome in the distance with the top of El Capitan on the left, it was a very emotional moment.

 And the back side of El Capitan kind of snuck up on us when we pulled into a picnic area for lunch.

 

Here we are with three icons: El Capitan on the left, Half Dome in the distant center and Bridal Veil Fall on the right.

We stopped for a stroll around the Ahwahnee Hotel.

Becky in the artful hotel entrance:

We arrived at Becky's home in Clovis two hours after leaving Yosemite. 

My son-in-law Mario had been missing his wife something fierce! We went out to dinner to celebrate our arrival.

Road trips are fun and full of adventure, especially with a wonderful travel companion! And now it's time to get on with the realities of day-to-day life. I'll be back in Pasadena tomorrow.

I'll have a couple of more posts about our road trip in the days ahead.

The photo at the top of this post is a closeup of art in the entryway of the Ahwahnee Hotel.