I have this thing with weekend trips.
I like to take a Friday-Sunday trip to wherever I can in the U.S.
Mainly to places I know I can do a lot or see a lot. I spend a lot of time looking for plane tickets centered around those days and I look often, so when I see a good deal I immediately book and start the planning process. The most recent trip was a place I have been itching to go to for about a year. YOSEMITE. One of the biggest influencers when it came to this place was a photographer by the name of Chris Burkard & a rock climber by the name of Alex Honnold.
I want to start off with Chris, you can see his work here. I haven’t spoke with Chris (yet) but he is someone who really made me fall in love with a place before I have ever seen it in person. Chris is a person who truly lives his life centered around adventure. His job is to go on adventures, & capture beautiful moments. The photo’s he takes of Yosemite, the way he talks about it was something I wanted to feel for myself. So to Chris, Thank you.
As for Alex Honnold, He was the first person to free climb the face of El Capitan. Which means he climbed up a 3,000 foot vertical face of marble slab with NO ROPES. I was listening to a podcast by Joe Rogan, and was impressed by this guy that I looked into Yosemite more, and I fell more in love with a place not too many people talk about. At least not around me.
We got into San Jose at 9:40 p.m. We got our rental and we hit the road. Drive was fairly boring for the first 2 hours, flat, curvy terrain. The last hour though, even though it was dark, I knew it was incredible. You could feel that you were trekking deep into the valley, the moonlight hitting the mountainside illuminating what your headlights didn’t. We stopped right outside the park and slept in our car for the night, and man was it COLD. We did not take into account that we were up north, and that it would be 40 degrees at night. Moments like this though are the ones I live for. About 20 feet from us was the river, she was a RAGER. Its springtime, which means all the snow caps from the mountain tops were melting. Waterfalls gushing, rivers rumbling. As I lay in the car, thinking about sleep, I also think about the view I will get in a few hours when I can see what the moon hasn’t shown me.
5:30 am - Im not very good at description, but it was chilly. The sun had not risen yet, but it was still lit outside. You could see your breath. You could see the dew on the ground. You could hear the water raging on, only this time you could see it. My initial thought upon seeing it was “If anyone fell in there, they would die” lol I was mesmerized. If I had some coffee, I could sit at the bank and just watch the waters crash over the rocks for hours.
One of the perks of waking up this early and being so close to the park is FREE ENTRY. Most National Parks are 24 hours, but are only manned from like 9-9. We didn’t know it yet but we get in free regardless because Marisa is in the military, but we were ecstatic at the time!
My next blog post is gonna be an itinerary of sorts for a weekend in Yosemite, so look for that in the next week!
Price Breakdown for trip.
San Antonio to San Jose, Ca (roundtrip) x2 = CRAZY GOOD DEAL. : $200
Car rental (4 days) - under 25 fee is what’s wrong with America. Lol : $176
Gas - (3 hour commute from San Jose to Yosemite) : $80
Food : $100
Views - Worth every penny.
This brings our total to : $556 // FOR TWO PEOPLE.
If you split that between two people, and take into account what we saw and what we did and the time we got to spend together away from home, it was well worth the trip. Head over to the gallery and check out the photos!
oh, & remember
ADVENTURE ALWAYS
-WNDR