Wednesday, September 2: We started off the day with picking up a new rental. We are now driving a red Ford Focus. I had to follow Jim for quite a distance since the nearest rental was 80 miles from our campground at Yosemite. The first part of the trip was completely flat but the closer we got to the park the more the grades and curves increased. The trip was going pretty good until about 20 miles out when Jim radioed that we should pull over. The driver’s side rear brakes were seriously overheating so we stopped for awhile to let them cool down. We decided to make that our lunch stop. We continued on slowly and were relieved that the last 20 miles did not require much breaking - the major hills were behind us.

We got to the North Pines Campground around 1:00 and got settled in.

Then we loaded up camera equipment and headed out to check out the Yosemite Valley area. We visited the Lodge and Visitor Center first. Then we drove the rest of the loop around the valley with many stops for some great photos.

At one of the stops we noticed a group of people looking up and pointing to the face of the El Capitan mountain. Once we joined them we found out they were watching two groups of hikers on the face of the mountain. Jim went back for his zoom lens and got some great shots of the hikers. They were planning on “camping out” on the mountain face tonight … I’ll take my queen size bed in a camper, thank you, please.

We finished our route back to the campground with a beautiful river reflection stop and a pair of mule deer in the meadow. We also took a walk in the campground and found one last shot of a mountain reflection (iPhone shot)