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Monday, June 27, 2011

Long Weekend at Yosemite National Park

This past weekend, Kathy, Chris, and Naomi went to Yosemite National Park to camp out with some of their friends. They invited me to come along. Since I wasn't enthralled by the concept of sleeping on the ground, I didn't join them in their tent. Instead, I stayed in a place near their campground in a little cabin that's a hybrid between a hut and a tent. When we got there, after a long drive, all of us were tired except Naomi. We tried to nap, but Naomi was quite energetic. She sang and danced.



You're not allowed to store food in your tent or in your car because the bears can get into those type places. Apparently bears come around every night in search of the food they can smell from miles away, but they know about the bear proof food storage boxes, and once they figure out that the food isn't available to them, they go someplace else to find a meal. Here's a bear proof food storage box.



Yosemite National Park is a huge place, but most of the visitors stay in the little valley where most of the campgrounds and hotels are located. The valley is quite scenic. Here are some photos from the Yosemite Valley.



The structure on the right in this photo is part of the Ahwahnee Hotel. It's vaguely possible that the term ahwahnee is a native American word meaning expensive. If so, the name of the hotel is quite appropriate.



An ancient Greek philosopher named Heraclitus said, "You can't step into the same river twice, because the second time the river isn't quite the same, and neither is the man who's stepping into it. Had Heraclitus been born a few thousand years later, he might have said, you can't take the same photo twice. Both of those observations may well be technically correct, but as far as the river thing is concerned, the river will still have the same name, and so will the man. And as far as the photo thing is concerned, you can take an awful lot of photos of the same landscape, and I did that this past weekend. Around 150 photos. Most of them of the same mountains. I'll just put a few more photos here because even if the photos I took aren't exactly the same, they're close enough that it doesn't make much difference.




A rock in "Mirror Lake," a pond that's not all that terribly reflective.

Monday, June 13, 2011

June 11 2011

 

Naomi being pensive

 
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Naomi standing near a peacock