| We traveled 13 days and 1,790 rainy and snowy miles. We took over six hours of video and 1010
pictures… Here are some day by day highlights from our trip. Saturday, Day one we started at Hearst Castle, we took the beginner's tour and it was pretty cool.. got some great pictures. We then went up the 1 PCH and again got some beautiful pictures of the coastline. The coast was overcastted but the sun would shine through here and there. We got into San Jose Saturday evening and got a hotel. Sunday we went to two of the California Missions (San Jose and Santa Clara) they were pretty nice, very old but interesting. We then did a tour of the Winchester Mystery House, if you don't know what this is it's a huge mansion with 160 room. There are doors that open to walls; windows open to walls, stairwell going no where.. it's a very bizarre house.. but it was fun.. we did the full tour. Monday morning we drove into San Francisco as the rain was pouring down. We checked into our hotel and checked the TV news weather and they said it was going to rain for the next seven days, which was our entire time here. Harry and I still had our colds from the prior week so this was looking to be one of the worse vacations ever!! Tuesday came around and it was still pouring, we bundled up and checked out Fisherman Wharf. Took a tour of Submarine, which was cool, then went on some virtual 4D rides, which were a lot of fun. We walked around in the rain for a few hours and then decided that we didn't feel so good and headed back to the hotel. Wednesday came around and it was cloudy but no rain.. we took advantage of this and walked across the Golden Gate Bridge. We then drove around the city, Castro and Civic Center area. It started to rain around 4 so we headed back to the hotel. I was feeling better but Harry wasn't at all. I actually was thinking of heading home, but Harry insisted that we stay, so he took a lot of medicine and started to feel better as the week went by. Thursday morning there was no rain so we visited Alcatraz; we took the audio guided tour. It was really interesting. We drove down Lumbar Street and went to the top of Coit Tower but of course it started raining around 5 so we called it a day. On Friday there was light rain but not bad so we headed up to Muir Woods (if you don't know what this is it's the lowest part of the Redwood Forest) we spent about three hour walking around there.. it was beautiful and the sun actually came out. We also drove around China town and Union Square. Now on Saturday it rained hard all day.. we rode a Trolley car over to China Town for the New Years Celebration then took a trolley over to union square and walked around there for a bit but with the hard rain it wasn't that fun so we decided to take a bus back to Fisherman Wharf and head to Ben and Jerry's, they have an internet cafe and it's about 10 bucks for an hour.. we checked our email and Harry had a few beers at Jacks (a bar on Fisherman's Wharf) then we headed back to the hotel. Sunday morning we checked out of our hotel and got back on the road. We stopped in Sacramento for lunch at Hard Rock Cafe and got into Lake Tahoe around 5pm. We checked into a hotel and called it a night. Monday we went on a 26-mile Snowmobile ride through the backcountry of the High Sierra Mountains. This was so much fun, it snowed and was very windy but that just made it more exciting. This was the most enjoyable thing we did on our entire trip. Tuesday we took the Gondola up 14,000 feet to Heavenly Valley Adventure Park and went snow tubing. After that we decided to head to Yosemite Park. We were on the backside of the mountains and knew there was a chance that the roads that crossed the mountains might be closed due to the heavy snowfall and of course this was the case. We continued to look for a road to cross over but everything was closed so we didn't get to go to Yosemite. Same thing happened to Kings National Forrest.. all roads crossing over the mountain had been closed. We stayed the night in the small town of Bishop. Wednesday we continued to travel south looking for a road to cross over the mountains. We really wanted to go to the Sequoia National Forrest. We finally found a road that was open and crossed the mountains, at least that’s what it looked like on the map. It was actually a nice drive, we drove pass Lake Isabelle. This place was beautiful. There was actually some off road trails around the lake so Harry had some fun and took the jeep off roading. We traveled for hours and hours through the mountains hoping to come out on the other end. We thought we were almost through it and then we hit a closed road and there was no way to go around so we had to back track about 90 miles to a freeway that we had seen that lead to Bakersfield. We got into Bakersfield about 5pm and I was exhausted. I had been driving since 9am so we stayed the night in Bakersfield. Thursday we got up and drove north about 200 miles to get to the south entrance of the Sequoia National Forrest. We wanted to see the Giant Forrest, which is about 100 miles up this windy road. We finally got there and it was covered in snow. We got out took some pictures and decided that we were tired and that we would head home. On the way home I had asked Harry to drive since I was not feeling so well. We got home Thursday night and I was in bad shape. I had a temp. of 103.5 and for the next few days I slept and don’t remember much. All in all this was a fun trip, we had some really fun times and some not so fun times. Our detours lead us to some of the most beautiful sights that we wouldn’t have seen given our plans and even though the weather wasn’t good at times it didn’t detour us from seeing some of the beautiful countryside of California. |
| Kenny and Harry's California Adventure 2005 |
| If you would like to see some pictures from our trip, press the "next" button to your right. |
| Kenny's Website |
| Harry's Website |
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