Life in Yosemite

The flora and fauna of the Yosemite National Park are striking and diverse. I spotted this amazing coloured shoot with a stem as thick as my wrist growing among the sequoias.


The sequoias themselves, of course, are on a rather more grand scale.

We were also favoured with an up close sighting of Bambi.

And my favourite North American native animal, the common ground squirrel. They are so cute!

By far, the animal I saw most often in the park was homo sapiens. Tourists were everywhere and the hardest part of taking any photograph was waiting until no strangers had their heads in the shot. I was a little surprised by one sightseeing group, however. I don't know if they were really able to get the full effect of the views.

Yosemite rocks!

There's more to Yosemite than just the trees and waterfalls. There are also a number of interesting rocks.


Some of them are surprisingly large.

Some of them are really, really big.

My dear friend Chris would love to scale this, like the rock-climbing human-spider that he is. I would love to lie on the grass in that meadow and watch him do it.

Yosemite Waterfalls

Those of you who remember my first visit to Yosemite last winter may remember that it was covered with snow at the time. Now that summer is nearly upon us, the snow is melting and pouring from the mountains in an impressive collection of waterfalls.

It was quiet and it was beautiful. I wanted to sit here all day in the warm sun and listen to the river burble over the rocks. I wanted to drag my fingers through the water and compose bad poetry for weeks.

Unfortunately, when I did decide to roll up my cuffs and wade calf deep into the river for this photograph, I was abruptly reminded that this water was snow very recently. My ankles went into hypothermic shock and I had to press my feet against a hot rock for several minutes before I regained sensation in my toes. This is water best admired from the banks.

But the admiration comes easily.

Sightseeing Sequoias

It's absolutely criminal to be in Fresno for this long without making a trip into Yosemite National Park. It's practically my backyard, but it's only now that I'm taking my first proper look around. It was worth the wait. There are a lot of interesting things to see there.

Like big trees.

Really, really big trees.

I'm reliably informed that these are comparatively small examples of the Sequoia redwoods. The big brothers of these ones have been hanging out in Sequoia National Park for thousands of years.

No wonder they get tired and need to have a good lie down.

Dad, Patricia and I went with Dylan, a business associate from Western Australia, to explore (one tiny corner of) the park.

Unfortunately it looks like the graffiti artists from the Grand Canyon beat us here.

The trees are even more impressive when they're standing upright.

They're fenced off for their own safety. The trees have extraordinarily shallow root systems considering their height and the pressure of stampeding tree huggers might shorten their lives, and those of any tree huggers in the vicinity when they fall.

One owner, cream puff

I have an exciting announcement to make. As regular readers will be aware, I have now been driving in the USA for over a month without incident and with increasing confidence. I have celebrated this miraculous achievement with the acquisition of a wrong sided vehicle. Oh yes, dear friends, I now have wheels!

For the mechanically minded among you, it is a 1999 Volvo S80 T6. For everyone else, it's navy blue and has heated leather seats.

Even the Volvo service department gave it two thumbs up, so its maintenance record beat out the competition hands down. The car has been so meticulously cared for that the dealer advertised it thus: "One owner, cream puff, would be the best way to describe this car in four words or less." I'm still not sure exactly what that means, but I gleefully christened the car the H.M.A.S. Cream Puff on the very first day.





Admittedly it's not a particularly sexy choice. It's responsible and grown up and very, very safe, but I am having some personal issues associated with the purchase. I don't even like lawn bowls!

My self image is not quite at the Volvo stage of its life cycle. An Audi A4, Saab 9-3, BMW 3 series, anything topless - this is how I saw myself in the last gasp of my twenties, driving across the USA on a voyage of personal discovery. A Volvo S80 is how I saw other people in the last gasp of their thirties, dropping off their kids at soccer practice or, worse, in the last gasp of their seventies, pausing forever at a stop sign while the frustrated people in the exciting cars behind them despair of getting around the corner while they're still young enough to enjoy it.

I have decided that the only way to offset this outbreak of vehicular maturity is to engage in acts of personal recklessness in and around the Volvo. The stereo offers sufficient volume and clarity to broadcast obnoxiously loud music through the windows and sunroof as it rolls by in all its conspicuous dependability. The spacious back seat provides ample opportunity for all sorts of thoroughly reprehensible behaviour in this exemplar of motoring respectability. The back seat of a Volvo - could sex be any safer? I'm even considering a daring respray - perhaps Kill Bill yellow or Kermit green would liven things up a little? My only hesitation is that my little Volvo driving hat might not match the new colour scheme.

The Long Road

As we made our way from the vast uninhabited reaches of Arizona back towards civilisation, there was a marked change in the views from the car. This:

Gradually gave way to this:

And the open road gradually became a very long, thin carpark.

This sign was an exemplar of understatement. Our speed wasn't merely reduced. It was eliminated.

Do you have any idea how long it takes to travel 8 miles at approximately 0 miles per hour? It's a very, very long time.

This could have been the best revenue raising opportunity the state of Arizona would ever see. Two policemen could have swept through, booked 10,000 cars for illegally parking on the highway and then fined them all double.

Gradually, as the journey dragged on, the signs became less amusing although, alas, perfectly accurate.

They told us so.

By this stage I would have been willing to throw myself off the promised damaged bridge.

After long enough on the road in the hot sun you start to lose your sense of humour. Eventually, you might even start to feel a little paranoid. I did. I'm sure this sign was put there just to mock me. It would have been a miracle if we'd cracked 6 miles an hour.

The traffic finally started moving, before the car ran out of fuel or exploded in the heat, and before any of the motorcyclists collapsed with sunstroke. Fortunately there were still a few roadsigns to entertain us. This one I captured just because I'd failed to photograph any of the proper cacti we saw in Arizona (sorry Murray).

I wasn't too sure what they meant by this last one. I presume the first two words were intended as a description of the product. It's hard to put the third word into a meaningful context. Does it refer to the size of the serving? The recommended frequency of purchase? Or is it perhaps advertising an added benefit of consumption?

Fellow Travellers

A road trip in the United States is definitely not a solitary activity. We had plenty of company, and not just from the tens of thousands of Laughlin River Run refugees making their slow, sunburned way home.



It's not enough for these people to buy an American scale pickup truck or SUV, like a ute on steroids, they then have to jack it way up into the air and drag a boat behind it. I'm particularly baffled by the need for the tyres to extend out further than the body of the car. Why? Why? Why?



I will say this for the truck driving road trippers, at least some of them are good boy scouts. This guy, when stuck in a traffic jam, didn't let the heat get him down. He just reached back into the icebox and grabbed a couple of cold drinks.



He seemed friendly enough so I encouraged Dad to pull up alongside and order a couple of drinks at the window. Alas, the opportunity did not present itself. I'm sure they would have been happy to help out, if only our window had come up higher than the wheel nuts on their truck.



If I thought the "normal" trucks here were huge, I was still in for a big surprise. When the biggest non-commercial truck on the road came up behind us I thought at first that it was a real truck, despite Dad's assurances that this was, in fact, just an overgrown pickup truck - like the one beside it.



Once I saw it from behind I realised that he was right. This gigantic machine is actually someone's private vehicle. They do the shopping in this thing. They drive it to to work. They take it to the drive-in (the vehicular equivalent of an afro in a cinema).


If bigger really is better, then this must be the best car in the world, and if men buy big trucks to compensate for small anatomical features, then this guy must have a concave appendage.

Route 66

"Get your kicks, on Route 66." To be honest I never really understood that song. Now I've seen a part of the old Route 66 and I'm just as befogged as before. I get the legend, the great transamerican journey made by millions of young explorers going west, just like the pioneers of the past. This is the ultimate car culture and the movies have given me a close enough affinity to sense the romance in a generation of travellers on the endless miles of two lane highway.

Alas, few traces of that romance remain for the young foreign traveller without personal nostalgia to pad out the experience. As the sign below suggests, Route 66 doesn't go as far as it once did.

The only original Route 66 sign I saw was tacked to a motel in a town called Needles.

The motel trades heavily on its Route 66 connection, but is probably hurt by the proximity of those same freight trains that kept me company in Kingman.

Based on the state of the former gas station across the road, it doesn't get a lot of traffic these days. I feel a faint sense of loss, and it's not even my history.

At least some fellow travellers were sharing the Route 66 experience in Needles. We stopped for breakfast with some strange bedfellows.

Sleepless in Arizona

On the way back to Fresno from the Grand Canyon we spent the night in a truck stop called Kingman (population: 20,069). I apologise in advance to the good people of Kingman and freely admit that my limited exposure to the town consisted of driving down about 3 miles of the main road, staying in a cheap motel and eating at a steakhouse. Kingman is one of the towns on historic Route 66 and I'm sure it has many charms. I just didn't happen to experience any of them.



This is the view from my motel room door. The trucks ran all night. I can testify on their behalf because I was awake all night listening to them. I don't really blame the trucks. The freight trains rumbling past behind them were much worse.

Adding to the road transport theme was the Laughlin River Run, an annual motorcycle rally that attracts over 60,000 riders. The only reason we spent the night in Kingman at all is because the first 399 hotels we tried to book a room in were packed to the rafters with motorcyclists. For the most part they were not motorcyclists of the big hairy, scary variety. Most of the ones I saw were middle aged, middle class weekend warriors who roared into the carpark, stepped off their hogs, swaggered into the restaurant and ordered a soy caramel latte and a green salad.



The machines themselves reveal the nature of most of the riders. These are heavily customised, dearly loved, lightly ridden motorcycles with all the bells and whistles. Note the drink holder on the middle bike in the row below. My car should be that luxurious.