After two full days at Disney, a travel day was just what we all needed to let our feet rest and for the girls to catch a nap. The scenery on our drive up to Sequoia National Park was so different than what I had expected California to be. I'd only been in the coastal towns so this was a new experience for me.
We arrived in this quiet little town, Three Rivers, south of the park on Tuesday afternoon. The girls swam for an hour or two and then we decided to find some dinner. There was a car club staying at the same motel and they were all so friendly. Brynna was especially excited to sit in the driver's seat of this pink convertible!
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| We had dinner at a little pizza parlor. |
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| And then took ice cream back to our motel. Beilyn thoroughly enjoyed her ice cream cone. 😆 |
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Wednesday morning, Alex woke us all up when he spotted this bear on the hill next to our motel room!
What an exciting way to start the day! |
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| This guy was our angel encounter on the trip. Alex, the planner that he is, creates a binder for each of our trips that includes the agenda for each day, directions, reservations, key points of interest, etc. In said binder, he had also tucked tickets, our passports, our Disney photopass, etc. in one of the sleeves. Well, in his excitement of seeing the bear, he had tossed the binder on top of our rental van and ran inside to get us. Then, forgetting about the binder, he drove over to a convenient store to buy bottled water for the day (and perhaps a mountain dew for his preggo wife). Apparently, the binder flew off when he left the store, was ran over, and all of it's contents crushed and scattered across the parking lot. This stranger found it and took it to the local motel to see if we were there. He was told we had just left in a white mini van. Someone else told him which direction we had headed and 7 miles later up the curvy mountain, he pulled up beside us and told us he had our passports!! I was so confused until he held up our binder and I knew he was being serious! We thanked him with a monetary gift and snapped a picture so we could remember the experience! What a witness to our girls about going out of our daily routines/schedules to help others! |
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| Without warning, Braylee did this. 😁 I'm glad I happened to catch it. It's so "Braylee." |
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| Getting their National Parks passports stamped. |
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| In front of Moro Rock. |
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| Looking back down at the curvy road we had just driven on. |
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| Working our way up Moro Rock. |
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| Headed back down. Beilyn was making me nervous! |
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| The trees are giant!! |
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| Two bumps along the road. 😉 |
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| Standing in front of the largest tree (by volume) on earth. |
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If you look closely, you can see Alex and Beilyn standing beside it.
The sequoias are massive! |
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| This was so funny. They ran into the woods and we heard them re-enacting the troll scene from Frozen, asking them to heal her frozen head. 😄 |
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| Kings Canyon National Park. |
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| Walking through a fallen sequoia. |
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| And coming out the other side. |
The next day, we visited Yosemite National Park! It was cold and even rained a little as we arrived that morning... and it didn't help that we were 7000+ feet in elevation.
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| Miss Beilyn was not happy when I took the stamp away from her as they were getting their passports stamped. She was getting a little carried away! |
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| Our view from Washburn Point. |
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| A couple of the waterfalls could be seen from this viewpoint. They are bigger in the spring/summer when the winter snowcaps are melting. |
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| As we approached this curve, Brielle yelled, "Dad, don't die!" ha! |
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| At the top of Glacier Point with Half Dome in the distance. |
