Early
start. I was outside the hotel from
6.35am waiting for the tour bus to pick me up.
They’d said 6.45 but I didn’t want to miss it. It didn’t arrive until 7.05... Most of the
trip I stayed quiet in back, with my ear phones in. Nirvana, Johnny Cash & Lady Gaga. Just what I was in the mood for..
The trip
was made up of 4 couples, the tour guide, and me. Well, I think the two young Aussie guys were
a couple, but I wasn’t certain... Their dress sense didn’t seem to be too good,
but they were young, and it is the fashion to wear the trousers half way down
the waist. And they were Aussie, so the
bad shorts and flip flops might be explained by that... I think they were a
couple, a few moments seemed to indicate it.
So, anyhow, me, the tour guide and 4 couples.
I decided
early on that I wasn’t going to make a play for the tour guide. 1) it is very tacky. 2) there would be the next day to get
through. 3) I started to get really
annoyed by the sound of his voice on the speaker along the journey. 4) he made us walk a hell of a long way (6
miles+) up very steep hillage in the freezing cold (it was snowing, hailing,
blizzarding) without any warning that we were going to be making such a stupid
trek. I mean, we had old people on the
trip. And I don’t mean me. There were real old people, parental type age
who were really suffering...
But it was
breath-taking. The sequoia trees are
beautiful. Hundreds, thousands of years
old, so huge, so tall. I took lots and
lots of pictures. And the hail/snow and
lack of other mad tourists meant we saw them in a really unique way which most
people never would.
I do forget
sometimes, though, that not everyone is quite as filthy-minded as me... Maybe
because I’m positively chaste compared to some of the company I keep.... (And I
count work colleagues in that too!!)
Anyhow, there were two trees, called the Faithful Couple. Over the hundreds or thousands of years they
had fused themselves together, almost like a reverse Siamese twin, born
separately but joined afterwards.. My
first response was that it was very unnatural to be so faithful for so long...
My second, was that they had basically just been having sex for hundreds of
years and what we were seeing was tree sex.
But I said it out loud. The old
people seemed a bit taken aback... :-p
But the
cold! At one point, Jordan, the crazy
tour guide, wanted to take the group up to some lookout point, another half a
mile or more upwards... We’d already
lost the older couple down at a mid-way stop.
I decided I couldn’t go further upwards, especially as he said the
escalation was going to be escalating....
And yet there wasn’t an actual escalator in sight... So, I waited. In the cold.
And the hail. Not necessarily my best decision. But they weren’t too long, they must have almost
run it.. I asked if it had been worth it
for the view – they couldn’t see more than 5 yds in the front of them, and when
we got down below we saw the sign – closed due to inclement weather. I told you, crazy, irresponsible tour guide.
I learnt
two interesting factoids whilst on the hike.
Firstly, fir trees are the vermin of the forest. They just keep growing, and grow very fast,
preventing other trees from taking root.
So, controlled fires need to be started to clear the vermin/rodent trees
and let the baby sequoia’s grow.
Basically, when we get real firs in our living rooms for Christmas, we
are decorating a rat-tree.
Secondly,
whilst you can’t eat the fungi that grow on the bark of the dead sequoia’s, you
can apparently get high from too many chanterelle mushrooms. Whilst you’d need to eat almost nothing but
chanterelle’s over several days to achieve any kind of hallucinogenic effect,
it is at least a legal high that is still legal....
We finally
got the hotel. I thought I was never
going to get warm again, but a hot bath and the heating blaring out in the room
sorted that. Ironically, it is the
nicest hotel room I’ve been in all trip.
Huge. Two king size beds, loads
of room to walk around them. A working
TV. Air conditioning, with heat. A bath as well as a shower.
I had
thought that dinner would be more sociable, but when I went to the restaurant
no-one else was there, so I had steak and a glass of red wine with my
kindle. The red wine was very nice
indeed, from a local winery called the Silver Fox, which I had to try as a
friend of mine sometimes goes by that name... (His hair is silver, and he’s a
big of a fox... My ex had a friend who
also went by that name, probably for similar reasons, but it’s a different
person). Anyhow, good wine and the steak wasn’t bad
either.
The next
day (today) we spent mostly in the Yosemite Valley. It was raining. Until we left, that is... Totally schizophrenic, multiple-personality
weather... Thankfully we weren’t on any
kind of compulsory programme of group ‘fun’ and could spend the time as we
wanted. I definitely wasn’t in the mood
for trekking up a hill or two in the freezing cold and rain, so took it easy,
doing all the museums, the Wahwannee Lodge Hotel (which has some amazing
interior design) and only doing the really low incline to the Lower Yosemite
Falls. Basically, pretending to be an
old person. It must be rubbing off...
Then, long
drive home, lots of chitter-chatter from Jordan, drowned out by some loud,
angry rock at full blast in my ears. I’m
sure he was saying interesting stuff but I just didn’t like the sound of his
voice...
At hotel
now. Homeward bound tomorrow. My case is definitely overweight, so will
have to see what happens when I check-in tomorrow... fingers crossed I get it
all home safely...
___________________________
Epilogue...
It’s been a
good trip. A much needed holiday, I was
near breaking point (well, I’d broken little pieces off already actually...),
what with working so hard and a pretty shitty year from a personal
perspective... But I’m out of all that
now, I’m excited about what might now happen at work – don’t know what, but
there are going to be changes of one kind or another – and I feel good in
myself, ready to get myself sorted and, well, happy.
