Yosemite National Park, CA

Yet another amazing national park.  Yosemite has a lot of waterfalls and big rocks - both of which I love.  We did the Mist Trail hike to Vernal Falls and Nevada Falls.  You DEFINITELY need rain gear this time of year because with the snow melting, the waterfalls are just gushing.  We got soaking wet!  You can shorten the trail and only go to Vernal Falls, but since we did a pretty long hike, I got to 30,000 steps!

Unfortunately, we did not get to hike the Half Dome because it doesn't open until May 26.  We may not even have been able to hike it if it had been open because it's a lottery system to see who gets to hike.  Only 400 people get to hike it per day, and on a slow day, they get at least 4,000 applicants.  On a popular day, they can get up to 12,000 applicants.  New life goal: hike to the top of Half Dome someday.

One thing I will say is that Yosemite was very crowded.  I don't even want to know what it's like in the middle of summer when I can only imagine it gets more crowded!

We stayed in Oakhurst, but T-Mobile has possibly the worst cell service in the US, so we had barely any service in the entire town, and the hotel's wifi didn't really work.  Since a lot of Yosemite was closed, we ended up leaving a night early to add Sequoia National Park to our trip.

At this point I want to mention the National Park annual pass.  You get an entire vehicle in to all of the national parks in the US for $80 for the whole year.  Each park alone costs about $30, and so far we've been to 8 of them.  Big money saver to by the annual pass!

​​See our USA photos here.