Day 62 - Road Trip to Sequoia National Park - June 6

Upon awaking, I was very hungry, so we went to Milt's for breakfast. I had a peanut butter, banana and honey sandwich with a side of hash browns. We did laundry after that in the motel machines, I called my Mom and then we checked out to hit the road. We stopped at a grocery store for supplies.


Ian is excited about coffee.
Yummy vegan food.  Ignore Ian's bacon in the background.
The road out of Bakersfield had oil wells pumping, then orange groves and strawberries and all sorts of road stands selling every kind of produce.

Oil wells
Kiawah Lake
We stopped at the Kiawah Recreation area, where there were displays about the dam construction and information about the area. There was a cool stuffed bobcat. When we told the volunteer that we didn't have reservations for Sequoia National Park, she looked at us like we had three heads. Crap, I guess I should have got one, but we were so close to the date. We'll just drive up and see. It's a Tuesday, how bad could it be?

Stuffed bobcat with stuffed quail in it's mouth
Well, the closest two campgrounds to the park entrance were full, but the third had vacancies when we got to the entrance. We stopped at the visitors center, there was a ranger out from showing people animal prints and pine cones. I learned that the sequoia pine cones open when there's a fire. He had a cougar print, I recognized it from the one I saw on the trail.

Tunnel Rock

Ranger showing off footprints and pinecones and stuff
All the driving was making me nauseous, I'm not used to so much sustained fast movement. The road through the park was very windy. We pulled over at a shady spot and I laid down for a while. The mosquitos were biting.

When we got to the Lodgepole Campground, they were full. Be had to keep going, the next open campground was 15 miles away. Lucky for us, it had a few sites left in the upper loop of Shady Grove. We actually got a sweet spot, walk in site C. It's pretty private and you get this great view of the creek. The creek is roaring so loud, you can't hear anything else. I highly​ recommend that spot. It's called walk in, but it's a very short walk. You walk farther in most parking lots.

We had dinner, put our food in the bear vault, and drove to see General Sherman, the largest tree in the world by volume. There were other tourists there, but not an overwhelming amount. Just enough to be amusing. We saw one guy using a selfie stick, up on the fence. Another guy took pictures of him using the selfie stick and I got a shot of them both. We also walked a little on the slightly less populated Congress Trail, and I found a nice rock in the setting sun rays. I lizarded that rock, laying in the sun. Ian drove back and I tried not to lose my lunch on the windy road. It's like the carsickness I had as a kid has come back. Great. Ian set up the tent while I rested. I felt better after a few minutes and then we went to bed.


General Sherman




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