Sun: Kings Canyon Sightseeing, Heading Home, and More BBQ

Here are the day's pictures. Di Yin took pictures too. The latter link goes to her first picture from this day (picture #218 in the album). The last picture for the day and album is captioned "Amazingly, almost everything dried by the time we were done with dinner, about 45 minutes later!" If you're in slideshow mode and see pictures of Hot City BBQ after that, you've cycled back to the beginning of the album and are viewing pictures from an earlier day that I already linked to. (Yes, I know it's funny that our trip both started and ended with a stop at Hot City BBQ.)

When you see a picture captioned "In the morning, we could see the sky through the car windows." (picture #218), you're done with her pictures for the day. I'll link to the next day's pictures in the following post.

We woke up Sunday morning in the car. Surprisingly, both of us felt okay. We both managed to find comfortable-enough positions. We slept our normal length of time. Sleeping in the car wasn't anywhere near as bad as I expected. Of course, it helped that nighttime temperatures were perfect for sleeping; we didn't have to worry about being either too hot or too cold.

We packed up our tent, air mattress, and various other soaked items that we'd left out all night. They were still soaked. We shoved them in the trunk after moving everything from the trunk into the back seat so those items wouldn't acquire the stench of the dampness.

Because our campsite's picnic bench was soaked, rather than eat breakfast there we decided to take our food to the nearby diner / market / visitors' center on this side of the park. When looking for a table, we ran into the couple we met the previous night. We joined them at their table and talked for a while as we ate. They were nice. They're Danish. The husband lives in Santa Barbara and works on wind power plants. We traded stories for a while.

They also told us more about the weather the previous day. They were hiking by a waterfall when it started drizzling. They turned around, making it down to their car just as it began pouring. The man, a fluid engineer, said at the time, "if it continues for more than a couple of minutes like this, we'll be washed out." And it continued and the road was washed out.

Breakfast, by the way, consisted of sardines or roasted zucchini placed atop whole wheat bread and accompanied by roasted mushrooms, bananas, and oranges. We tried to share with the couple but all they accepted was the fruit.

After breakfast, we began our main plan for the day (beside getting home): sightseeing as we drove up and out of Kings Canyon. We stopped at various points on Highway 180 ("Kings Canyon Scenic Byway") on the way out of the park. We must've stopped ten times along a fifteen mile segment of road. The views of the glacial canyon, meandering river, and spectacular tall cliffs were amazing. For details see the pictures.

The morning sightseeing completed, we stopped at Kings Canyon Visitor Center near the entrance to the park. I thought it was neat that all its information signs are in both English and Spanish. In the visitor center we watched a short intro video about the park that had great cinematography.

Next up: lunch. Walking across the street to Grant Grove Village, we got a nice waitress to open our can of salmon for us. Sitting on a bench, we ate it on top of bread or on top of potato chips. We also had a bit of fruit (but no vegetables--we'd finished all the ones we managed to cook Friday night). It was a light-ish lunch; we had plans for dinner...

After lunch, we visited General Grant Tree, the third largest tree by volume. We walked briefly around the surrounding sequoia grove but didn't get to see much of it--we had to start heading home in order to get back at a reasonable time. However, as we left the pair of parks, I insisted that Di Yin and I stop by two nearby overlooks that sounded promising. Once we saw those, we drove speedily home.

We stopped only once on the way home for an early dinner at Hot City BBQ in Los Banos. We ate there two days earlier on our way to Sequoia/Kings Canyon and liked it so much we were happy to eat there again on the way back. It was similarly good.

"Hot City" (a.k.a. Fresno) provided another nice benefit for us. We removed our soggy air mattress from the trunk and draped it over the roof of the car. Sleeping bags, blanks, pillowcases, and other clothes went on the hood and the trunk and hung out windows. I felt like we exceeded the bounds of the redneck scale. I don't think the owner was particularly happy about this sight in his parking lot--we had to park it in sight so we could watch and make sure no one took our stuff--but we explained the situation and laughed a lot and I think he ended up comfortable with it.

The air's dryness combined with the heat sucked the water from these items. We flipped them once in the middle of dinner and by the time we left, after about an hour, everything was perfectly dry!

Closer to home, we noted that Gilroy smelled more strongly of garlic than usual.

And thus concludes this trip report.