Day: 79
Date: 20/06
City: Mammoth Lakes, California
Miles ridden: 172
Cumulative miles: 6677
Today we drove to Emerald Bay and had a look at the waterfall from Inspiration point along the road. Doesn’t this look fantastic?
We then turned around and drove back to Mammoth lakes using the scenic route again. During our drive we meet a ‘Harry Hirsch’, (reference to a German comedian ‘Otto’) a deer, who tried to play dare with us J. The picture was taken through the wind screen.
On the way back we stopped at multiple viewpoints, the best was over Mono Lake.
We tried to find some nice but cheap accommodation on the, without success. After 2.5h of trying, we went back to Mammoth Lakes, the same hotel that we had before. The good thing was that it was in walking distance of the ‘Mammoth Brewing & Co’ Brewery.
‘Mammoth Brewing & Co’ Brewery is the highest brewery on the western coast, so we had to try it, particular after the ‘Double Nut Brown’ won a gold medal in the world beer cup J. The beer tasted as the name said, a bit like roasted peanuts, but the bartender assured me that no nuts were hurt during the creation of the beer, so that’s nice…. 😉
Day: 80
Date: 21/06
City: Modesto, California
Miles ridden: 220
Cumulative miles: 6897
In the morning we had a look at the lakes around Mammoth Lakes, there are plenty of crystal clear lakes and beautiful valleys. On the second picture in the middle you can see a small waterfall.
Sigrid had to try how cold the water was J
At the end of one road we found a warning sign, that there was a natural high level of carbon dioxide coming out of the ground. The white dead trees indicate that there is some truth to it.
So we decided to drive to an area with more oxygen and not so many dead trees, and drove back to Yosemite. When we entered the park we noticed a steam running in parallel to the road, and stopped to have a look. This time I tested if the water was cold; it was ok after the feed went numb.
We continued on the Tioga Road and towards the Tuolumne Meadows, where some of the big Giant Sequoias trees are. We walked to Giant Sequoias, they can get up to 3000 years old. It was hard to take a picture of the whole tree but with the panorama shot it seem to work, I love the panorama feature.
One dead tree had a tunnel carved through its trunk, that might show the size of the trees. Not far from there there was a fallen tree, have a look at the roots of that thing!.
I guess the oldest tree was older then 2000 years, but the youngest one that we found was propably not even 100 years old.
From here on we continued through Yosemite Valley to take pictures of the valley that we didn’t take on the previous visit. We stopped on nearly all viewpoints and discovered some waterfalls that were not visible from another view point.
In the panorama shot below you can just make out Yosemite valley in the left half of the picture.
After we ran out view points, we continued into the valley and stopped at a park bay where the stream was running along the road. There was also a nice beach was visible. So we headed over and had a lunch break. Since it was warm, Sigrid went swimming and I stayed in the water.
It took a while before we decided to go back to Modesto.
Once when we arrived at the hotel, we got the ordered parcels and everything was there. Before we left on this car trip, we ordered some stuff that was either broken during the accident or was missing. I must admit, the staff in the hotel were very helpful and made things much easier for us. It was still warm outside, so we decided to have a short dip in the hot tub, hmmm, live can be hard. The right picture shows the view out of the hot tub.
