Spring Break 2008...part 1 (San Francisco, CA --> Yosemite, CA : 02/22/2008 - 02/24/2008)

So, the highlight of my semester so far is Spring Break. It's not where I had in mind during winter break, none of those Caribbeans beaches or Spanish cruises, but instead, a trip to San Francisco -> Yosemite National Park -> Las Vegas via Death Valley National Park -> Grand Canyon National Park -> Las Vegas. The trip was great in many ways, the destinations, the company, the price tag, and all the jokes. The company, a couple and 3 very bright ones, as in lightbulbs. (Keng Yang & Pei Ying, Siew Gee, Ren Jie, and I).
My luggage.

Day 1:

Where should I start? From the very beginning. We left on a very cold Friday (02/22/2008). We took the very first AirBus to the airport at 4.30 in the am to catch our 6.30am plane. Well, we took the red-eye because not only it saves us more than $100 a ticket, but also, gives us more time in San Francisco. We flew from DTW to San Francisco, CA via Chicago Midway. The transit flight was delayed for about an hour. We reached San Francisco, CA aka The industrial city at 12+pm, and finally got our rental car at 12.37pm.
One of our(Siew Gee and I) many Starbucks coffee of the trip.
Sleepy heads... how lovely...
LOL... sorry... :P
Arrived at San Francisco International airport.
The weather was great. Sunny and windy.
As I can never sleep much on moving objects, I decided to become the driver of the trip. All 1500+ miles of them. :)
It's a full-size car, (a good choice as we had a lot of driving to do for the next 7 days.) A Chevy Impala.
So, our first stop is San Francisco Chinatown. There, we stopped for food. Good food. Soy-sauce chicken, Roasted duck, Roasted Pork (Siew Yoke) and Barbecue Pork (Char Siew) and Wan ton. Not to mention the complimentary soup. See picture below.
Satisfied...

Also, we bought some pastries for the road. Custard tart aka Egg Tart, custard pie and custard rolls.
It was kinda 'foggy'...

We drove around for awhile to look for a good spot to take the famous San Francisco bridge (the red color one).
Titanic... Jack and Rose... bleuuukkk... almost lost my lunch there... :P
We found a scenic drive route and found a perfect spot.
While we were trying to navigate our way back to our printed directions to start our drive to Yosemite, CA, Keng Yang noticed that we were close to the infamous San Francisco road that's very steep and curvy. Lombard Street. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lombard_Street_(San_Francisco)
We took a video of our drive down the road, but it's pretty high in resolution and stuff, more than 100mb. So, I'll figure out a way to upload it somewhere.
Siew Gee spotted this in downtown San Francisco. Wolverines!!!

Ooops... sleepy heads...
Downtown San Francisco, CA. Californians are pretty bad drivers... :)

Driving in San Francisco is really insane. The slopes. Some roads are at an impossible gradient of 40-50%. I wonder how people walk these slopes. Worst of all, there are stop signs at virtually at every single junction. Even with an automatic car, the car starts to roll backwards. It will be fun to drive a shift stick, to balance the car with the clutch and accelerator pedals.

It's about a 4-hour drive from San Francisco, CA to Yosemite, CA. Because of the office traffic at about 4+pm, it took us a slightly longer time to get there. We reached Yosemite, CA at about 9pm. We had dinner at McD, drive-thru actually, because it closed at 9pm. We called it a night at about 10.30 - 11pm because of a long day tomorrow.

Day 2:
We woke up at 6ish am, went for the complimentary breakfast at 7am. Hit the road at 8am. While filling up gas, a nice guy asked us if we will be visiting Yosemite National Park, well, we looked pretty tourists-like, with my Michigan cap and rental car, we said yes. He asked if we have snow-chain/cables for our tires, and snow boots and all. As, we can see snow-covered at about elevation of about 3000 ft.
The snow-covered peak is 3000ft.
We should expect much more snow at about 5500 ft (Yosemite National Park). So, we asked about where we can get snow cables and got it on the way there. Also, we stopped by the information center to get more brochures and information about the conditions up there. And also, where to stop for pictures and all. At about 9.30am or closer to 10am, we arrived at the entrance of the national park, after purchasing the annual pass, we started our more adventurous drive, and even more so when we were told that we needed to install the snow cables and all.
Yup. This is the kind of snow we were talking about.
Another one. This is at the entrance where we purchased our annual pass.
And we managed to install them by reading the instructions.
Me installing the snow cables...
Installed...
Group pictures in front of Yosemite Valley... The one of the left is the El Capitan rock formation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Capitan
Better view of El Capitan and the valley.

Dirty and frozen fingers after installing the snow cables

Most people were there for the skiing, but we were there for the sightseeing and 'hiking'.

We reached the top at and finally parked our car at about 11.30am, had our lunch at Degnan's Deli, and then, caught a bus started our real journey in Yosemite National Park.
We hiked quite a lot for people as underprepared as we were. We only sneakers and walking clothes. We hiked about 1-mile to the Mirror Lake, but it was kinda disappointing because, well, there's not much water to reflect the surroundings on water surface.
Mirror Lake... Nice, but not super nice as I was expecting...
On the way to Mirror Lake.
Slightly longer exposed to get the silky water effect.
Then, we hiked for another 1.5 mile to a trail, just to find out that it's closed for winter.

But the sceneries were breathtaking.
Those are real, wild deers. This is a national park, not Disneyland.

Also, we went to the Lower Yosemite Fall, where we took some really nice pictures... :)
Group picture are lower Yosemite Fall
Me at Lower Yosemite Fall. A closer look of the fall.

We hit the road to head back to our hotel at about 4.30pm because it started to get dark, and because weather forecast said that weather was gonna get worse. Snowing and all. We needed to put on snow cables again, and another nice guy helped us to install our cables. So, on the drive down, as it was really snowing heavily, with strong wind gusting, I pretty much drove at 25-30 miles/hr. It was about 6.30pm by the time we reached our hotel. We drove around in Oakhurst, CA downtown to search for food, but to no avail. We did some stocked up on drinks and snacks for the entire trip at a hypermarket. Then, we decided to have dinner at a Chinese restaurant right beside our hotel. Again, we went to bed early, relatively, at about 11pm because of the long journey the next day.