A little break

We managed to get away on a mini-vacation this week. A friend of mine in lab has a timeshare that she had to book for an entire week, but was only able to use it for 3 days, so she offered the other 4 to us. So Sun-Wed we stayed at Bass lake, which is located between Yosemite National Park and King's Canyon National Park. The town house we stayed in was nice, very similar to our old place in the University Village actually. Except this place had a fireplace, dishwasher, washing machine and dryer and two bathrooms. We came home every night and cuddled in front of the fireplace and enjoyed a glass of wine or cognac before going to bed. It was very romantic and a welcome break from the stress of lab life.

We took day trips to both Yosemite Valley and King's Canyon. In Yosemite Chris of course took pictures while I tried hard to stay warm! These are a couple of my pictures that I took with our little point and shoot camera. We were there inbetween seasons really. There was snow at higher elevations, but not in the valley. But it was still pretty cold. We had hoped to find the valley blanketed in snow, but instead we found brown meadows and trickling waterfalls. We still saw some beautiful views, just not what we were hoping for. We also went ice skating on ice skating rink that is situated under half dome. It was very beautiful to watch the colors of sunset on half dome while ice skating or trying to skate anyway. This was only my third time ice skating. I managed to not fall, but I never felt comfortable while skating. But it was still fun.





We had yet to visit King's Canyon, which is the most infrequently visited National Park. And really quite beautiful and we didn't even get to go all the way into to King's Canyon due to snow. It snowed while we were there and it was just beautiful. Although the snow really stressed me out while we were driving. Driving on snow in flat Missouri is bad enough, but try adding in mountain hills and curves. I was pretty stressed out, even though the snow was only an inch deep on the road. It was still a nice trip and we also saw the largest (by volume) tree in the world - General Sherman.


















I really needed this trip. I'm going to be swamped with final grading, experiments and grant writing for the next few weeks and really needed this breather before the storm hit.