We left the city around 4:30am, pushing our departure up an hour earlier compared to the previous trip. This is the most still time. People were ambling home from the bars while we were ambling toward adventures. Funny how neither party was really fully awake. We're all just treading through this still time.
Determined to make it to Yosemite by sunrise, we did just that and I remember very little of our early morning conversation, or the music we listened to, or what silly things we said to keep one another awake. I just remember beginning to give each of my eyes ten seconds of rest... first the left eye and then the right eye before I asked Deb to take over. Oh yes, of course I went to Yosemite with Deb.
We stopped at many of the same spot and overlooks and vista points from our prior trip because wow, these places were vastly different. The whole color scheme had flipped from cool blues and grays to warm yellows and streams of sunlight. We also found ourselves ahead of the packs of tourists who were somewhere nestled in tents, or back behind at the park gate, or maybe far ahead on a hike before us.
We did some of the tourist spots, but one of the highlights of the day was leaving the path and wandering through some woods. Simple enough, but we felt like Hansel and Gretel leaving a field to enter the dark forest. We eventually exited out into a clearing with a pond, a lake? Deb told me she only wished for wildlife, deer specifically, in that moment and then it happened. They were there, as were we, and we just all said hello.
We concluded the day with lunch at Glacier Point, except we gave up a mile or so before we reached our destination, and decided to park alongside a Jeep twin, and claim our own peak for picnic. The view was probably better anyways. The souvenir pinecone definitely was. Okay, back to Yosemite soon. Yosemite in winter? Yes.