Yosemite and San Francisco Feis

Memorial Day weekend, we took Brenna and her friend Ryleeand headed off to Yosemite for a day. We left on Thursday eveningand arrived in "beautiful" Merced early Friday morning. We stayed inthe Marriott there. The hotel was nice, but the surroundings wereinteresting. This is a picture of the gas station where we stopped to get gasbefore we headed into Yosemite on Friday morning.

Luckily, the closer we got to Yosemite, the prettier the scenery became. As we pulled into Yosemite valley, we first tried to enter the parking lot forBridal Veil Falls. It was full and the ranger waved us on to the next stop. At first we were disappointed, but when we got there

this was the view. Amazing, huh?

That is Bridal Veil falls in the distance.Geologist Joe was in hog heaven. Just look at that contented face.

We headed back down into the valley so we could hike up the the foot of the falls. When we got
there, Rylee and Brenna found a little friend. Here he is on Rylee's nose. They named him
Frederickson and played with him for quite awhile.

Before we left, they had to let him go, but they decided that this beautiful meadow would be the best new home for him. Those two little dots in the middle are Rylee and Brenna.

Here is Bridal Veil Falls. We hiked to the foot of the falls. The water was hitting so hard that the spray was falling like rain. We were soaking wet when we came down to the car.
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We saw all the high points of the park. Joe especially wanted to see half dome. There was not a good view point that we could drive to, so we parked the car and headed out to hike to a viewpoint. The sign said it was an easy 1 mile hike. On the way, Brenna and Rylee
posed for some great pictures!

There is pretty much nothing these girls won't do for a picture. This is both of them in one rotting log. Blech!

A couple of (pretty easy) miles later, this is the view we came to.
WOW!
Look how tiny Joe looks.

That night we stayed in Merced again. The next day we headed to San Francisco. Once we got settled into our hotel, we went to China Town to shop and have dinner. I can't believe I didn't
take any pictures there, but I didn't. The next morning, we took the girls to Fisherman's Wharf. They spent most of the day at Pier 39. Their favorite things were the SpongeBob ride
and the mirror maze.

We had seafood dinner and Joe was again, quite content.

The next morning was Brenna's feis. She won two trophies for a 4th place finish (out of 23) and a 2nd place finish (out of 19). This picture is her accepting her second place trophy.
You can barely see her. She is on the left in the pink and white dress.

Once she was done competing, we jumped into the car and drove straight home.
We made pretty good time and got home a little before midnight.
And that was the end of a very very fun and exhausting weekend.