First Day in Yosemite

The drive from San Francisco (which happened the day prior) to where our Airbnb was in Groveland was a long drive. What should have been less than 3 hours turned into nearly 5 due to California traffic. We were hoping with our flight getting in at 2 pm that we would miss some of the rush hour traffic, but no we didn't... Our car gave us "helpful" statistics and let us know that our 150-mile journey was completed at an average speed slower than 30 miles per hour. But after a long day of travel, we made it to our destination at 9 pm.

We woke up with no real plans made yet for the day. With Katie's ankle injury, we didn't want to plan anything since we needed to decide the day's activities on a day-to-day basis based on how her ankle felt. Since it was the first day of the trip, we decided to do something that wouldn't push her but also wasn't one of the really easy hikes that we wanted to save for more of a rest day. The hike to Inspiration Point fit what we were looking for and that's where we headed first thing in the morning after taking our time waking up from such a hectic travel day.

After an hour drive to get to the trailhead, we started our hike at 9:30. Katie's ankle wasn't a problem, but Katie started coming down with a cold the day prior, and her lungs were the limiting factor on the hike. Katie made it about 2/3 of the way up before turning back while I finished the hike. The views at the top were a little better than what we had gotten before Katie turned back, but it wasn't really that meaningful for her to summit. The amount of haze in landscape photos makes most of the photos not that appealing anyway, so at the top of Inspiration Point I was inspired to find better lighting (spoiler: I didn't).

After meeting up at the trailhead, we went to the Bridalveil Falls viewpoint, which was the main waterfall we could see from the Inspiration Point hike. That was a short half-mile hike that included getting soaked from all the mist falling off the waterfall. It was a lot of fun that didn't yield many photos but still worth stopping and cooling off at.

The afternoon consisted of driving through Yosemite valley and stopping at the gift shop, welcome center, and at a pull off of a viewing spot for El Capitan.

In the late afternoon and evening we went grocery shopping, picked up an inhaler for Katie to hopefully have a better time hiking tomorrow, and planned out some other things for us to do for the next few days.