Yo yo Yosemite!

Yosemite was magical, breathtaking, magnificent, and everything I hoped it would be.  But before I talk about the hikes we did, I have to mention our 10 hour drive to the park.  At our first stop, we were eating lunch on the curb right by our car.  A middle aged man walked by and said how cute Sadie was.  He then asked, "what kind of treats does she like?"  I responded, "umm... icecream?"  He proceeded to tell me he would find something inside the gas station and bring it back for her.  He came back with a big, fat ice cream sandwich.  I let Sadie have a few licks and bites and then I ate the rest.  Don't worry, it was only 2% creepy.  

That night, we stopped in the most run down town I've ever seen.  It was called Tonopah in Nevada.  We found a restaurant that was inside a hotel.  The food was great, but then we found out from our waitress that the hotel is haunted and she proceeded to tell us several ghost stories accompanied by pictures that seemed super legit.  It was super scary.  She said she was in the bathroom once and she heard high heels clanking on the floor and she peeked through the crack in her stall and saw no one.  When we were done with our meal, I needed to pee but I refused to use their restroom. I made Brady take me to the nearest gas station.  I'm such a wuss.

Our first day in Yosemite, we hiked to Cathedral Lakes off Tioga road.  By the end of the hike, we were close to 10,000 feet.  The hike was beautiful.  We crossed a stream and followed it for awhile.  When we got to the top, we saw the lake and decided to keep hiking to the far side.  I'm so glad we did because on the other side of the lake, we had the most amazing view of the park.

This what our faces look like when we're trying to get Sadie to smile. Yikes!

We have a "hold hands" song.  :)

Poor Sadie was in this position a lot when Brady was setting up the camera

I taught Sadie to tickle Daddy and to poke his ears while she was in the backpack.  She hurt him a few times, but it was all in good fun :)

Of course Brady had to get into the frigid water

I feel like she should be the poster child for little hikers everywhere ;)

Cathedral Peak is in the background.

I wish you could see the entire view! It was spectacular

  By the time we got back to our car and drove another 1.5 hrs to our campsite, it was 7:30pm.  We broke all camping rules and went to Curry Village for pizza.  We were starving and preparing dinner would have taken way too long! That pizza was dang good, even if we felt a tad guilty about it ;)
We did build a fire and roast s'mores like normal campers to make up for our sin.

She loves her mini camping chair!

Brady was trying to take a selfie with the deer that roamed right by our tent.  He's a little embarrassing. 

Brady is the best and cooked most of our meals.  Sadie had a front row seat to the cooking show

The second day we were there, we set off to hike the Mist trail to see Vernal falls and Nevada falls.  We didn't have a map or cell service, so we didn't exactly know where to go.  We found out later that at one fork in the trail, we chose right when we should have gone left.  We ended up hiking 6 miles around the valley.  It was actually really fun to see some awesome views of Half dome, so it wasn't a waste of our time.

Sadie was always so excited to get out of the backpack! 

After that 6 mile hike, we went back to our campsite and had lunch.  Good thing I carried all of it with me in my backpack just to eat it back at camp :-/  I guess I can't complain when Brady carried Sadie the entire trip.  After lunch, we figured out where the mist trail was and hiked another 4 miles.  We're so glad we did because this was the last sunny day of our trip and the views were amazing.  We ended up only hiking to Vernal falls.  Once we got to the falls, there were steep steps that led to the top.  Brady convinced me that we needed to see the view from the top.  

Sadie's face is my favorite in this one

Good thing people suck at taking pictures for us :(

Poor Sadie got pretty wet from the mist!

Going up to the top of the waterfall was fine, but coming back down was sketchy.  The steps were slippery from the mist and I was so worried that Brady would slip and fall with Sadie on his back.  I told him he wasn't allowed to look up unless he was stopped completely. He followed my rule, and we all survived!  We were pretty beat by the time we got back to our campsite.  We were tempted to get pizza again, but made dinner instead ;)

The second night, Sadie woke up at 11;30 pm and was ready to party.  I didn't want her to wake up the whole campground, so I let her out of the pack n' play.  I literally sat in our tent, cross-legged, for a couple hours while she rolled all over my sleeping bag and stole my pillow.  She finally fell asleep between Brady and I... and of course Brady slept like a dog through it all.  Kill him!

That morning, it started to rain.  Camping in the rain is one of the worst situations.  Brady was a gem and made french toast while Sadie and I hung out in the tent.  After breakfast, we packed up all of our stuff and went to find some shorter hikes since it was so cold, and we felt bad having Sadie freeze.  We walked to Lower Yosemite falls and on the way had a sweet view of half dome.  

We drove to our hotel after that and hoped that the rain would stop for the next day.  It didn't.  We went to Mariposa Grove on the South side of Yosemite park and saw some massive sequoia trees.  It was snowy and raining there and pretty dang cold.  We had to feed Sadie bits of starburst to keep her happy.  Her little hands were so cold.  Poor girl.  The trees were so cool though!  The famous ones all had different names... that I, of course, can't remember.

I ran for about a mile to get Sadie back to the warm car.  It was a great workout!

When we were done at the grove, we drove back toward the Valley and stopped at the "Tunnel View" where you can see a great view of the valley.  We did a little 2 mile hike to "Artist Point" to see an even better view.  Sadly, the clouds covered some of half dome, but it was still beautiful.

My brother Jared taught me this trick with the pano.  I'm so cool!

Sadie is really cool too!

And I have to add pictures of Sadie's favorite part of the whole trip, the hot tub.  :)

We definitely want to go back to Yosemite someday without kids so we can hike Half Dome and some of the other really cool but time consuming hikes.  We were so glad to go and to experience the beauty of such an awesome national park.