Fri: Hot City BBQ, Forestiere Gardens, and Kings Canyon Campground Adventures

I took pictures this day of course. Di Yin took many more, especially of our stop at Forestiere Gardens. The latter link goes to her first picture from this day (picture #1 in the album). When you see a picture captioned "In the morning, waking up in pleasant temperature and on a great bed!" (picture #83), you're done with her pictures for the day. I'll link to the next day's pictures in the following post.

I took the day off from work for this trip. We left the apartment 1.5 hours later than we planned, but that's okay because it's a vacation.

Our drive began along the same route we take to L.A.: south on 101 and then over 152 past the San Luis Reservoir. San Luis Reservoir was still pretty but, as with our last trip, the hills were still brown. The water level was noticeably lower now.

On a tip from a friend, we stopped for lunch at Hot City BBQ (officially Hot City Barbeque & Bistro) in Los Banos, part of California's central valley. It was an awesome tip! For details see the pictures. I'm glad we started this trip on a Friday; the restaurant is only open three days a week--had we left on a Thursday, we couldn't have stopped there.

Further across the central valley, we stopped in Fresno to visit the Forestiere Underground Gardens. Forestiere (the guy's last name) spent four decades excavating by hand dozens of acres. He did this to get a cool place to be in this hot region. It worked; it's ten or twenty degrees cooler underground than above. He used only ordinary tools, no dynamite or power tools. That's a lot of work! He knew how to excavate because he had previous experience digging subway tunnels.

He started with carving a bedroom, a courtyard, a kitchen, a living room, and a bath, and then just kept building. The result is surprisingly large. Many rooms over three levels! Although the architectural design is reminiscent of catacombs, don't think about the typical dark catacombs--he included many skylights, open-air courtyards, and plants, so it's quite a different type of space.

Nowadays people have other options for cooling off in hot weather--we saw a big water park (with long, high, twisting water slides) across the highway from the gardens.

The only reason Forestiere had time for this--for a while he only did it during his spare time--is he didn't have a family. He eventually quit his job farming and made the gardens an underground resort. He started giving tours.

I think this living underground is cool, as was his commitment to the project. Forestiere also did something else rather cool. He grew things (herbs, trees) underground. He grew lemons and oranges (mostly unusual varieties of these) and grapefruits, kumquats, quince, and more, sometimes all of these on one tree. He was good at grafting. I bet he closely followed the work of Luther Burbank. Most of the trees we saw in the gardens are the original ones he planted.

Upon his death, his land was sold. His brother bought ten acres to preserve his work. The rest of the land and the attached caverns on the land was filled in. Probably fifty rooms were lost. Supposedly a few houses in the nearby areas preserved their rooms as cellars, but it's sad the majority is now lost.

Both Di Yin and I enjoyed this excursion.

After the underground gardens, we continued heading to Sequoia / King Canyon, two National Parks joined at the hip.

The campground we wanted to go to near the parks' northern entrance was full, so we had to drive an extra hour to Moraine campground in Cedar Grove in the heart of Kings Canyon National Park. I hadn't intended to see much of Kings Canyon this trip--the trip was mainly for Sequoia--so this was quite a change.

The drive to into Kings Canyon was impressive. I'm glad we were forced to do it. We stopped early on at a viewpoint. Other than that, I only took pictures from the car during this drive--we wanted to make it to our campground before dark so we could have an easier time setting up. I took a lot of pictures on Sunday when we consciously decided to sightsee along this road.

Once at our campsite, as usual we had trouble starting a fire despite the special easy-fire-starter log we brought. We needed to fan the fire for a long time to keep it alive. I'm apparently better at fanning with the right rhythm and strength than Di Yin, but it's a lot of work.

I'm glad Di Yin packed emergency sandwiches. We ate them for dinner; we didn't have to wait for our fire to get going in order to eat. We used the fire to cook the vegetables we'd eat for breakfast and lunch the following days.

As for camping, it was great. There were some mosquitoes but they went away within an hour of our arrival. The temperature was perfect. We needed pants but not a jacket in the evening. The night was a bit cold but comfortably so. Topping it off, we slept on an air mattress with pillows! (We inflated it using a car power adapter.) It was great. We should always camp like this.