Our flight from Richmond left at 1:30 in the afternoon on Thursday so both Jeremy and I took off the whole day. We spent the morning running last minute errands before heading to the airport early to meet up with a friend who sold me her scooter (a Yamaha Vino) so we could exchange payment and the title. My parents were flying out of Dulles and it just happened to work out (no really, not planned) that our connecting flight to San Francisco was through Dulles on the same flight. We all were lucky enough to fly first class courtesy of miles and upgrades so we had a pretty relaxing cross-country flight. We landed in San Francisco (hello first time on the West coast!) around 7:30 PST, grabbed our bags from baggage claim and headed to a nearby Hilton for the night.
After our complementary hotel breakfast we set out towards the east and Yosemite National Park. Typically this is about a 4.5 hour drive but we stopped in Oakdale to pick up groceries for the next three days (breakfast, packable lunches and dinner) and to have lunch at a local deli called Ferrareses Deli that came highly recommended on both TripAdvisor and Yelp. I had a very tasty avocado BLT, Mom had the pesto chicken sandwich and Jeremy and Dad both had the French Dip, yum.
Most of the trip we just spent looking out at the scenery, as it changed from tan dry grass hillsides with wind farms, to seemingly endless groves of pecan trees, then finally to tall pine and cedar trees as we entered the national forest and ultimately Yosemite National Park.
We are staying in the only private residential section allowed in the park (courtesy of AirBnB, the Yosemite Sunset House), about an hour’s drive (15 miles) from the main visitor’s center in Yosemite Valley. We couldn’t check in until 5pm so we decided to head to the visitor’s center to pick up maps, standard souvenirs (I always buy photo magnets from places I visit, my mom always gets one of the 8×10 photo tour books), and to see if there was anything we wanted to make reservations for while we were in the park. The Ansel Adams gallery hosts 1.5 hour morning walks for free most mornings so we called and were able to reserve spots to take that tour in the morning. We are also talking about doing w horseback trail ride, hopefully we can fit that in, I haven’t ridden a horse for probably 18 years but it would be fun to do again, so we will see.
(from left to right) El Capital, Half Dome and the Three Brothers
On our way to the visitors center we passed by many of the park’s most famous sites, Bridal Veil falls, El Capitan, Half Dome, it’s amazing to see these in person, the views almost don’t look real, the scale of everything is just awesome.
We arrived at our house around 5:30, lugged all our suitcases up the three flights of outside stairs to be greeted by a pine tree studded view of the mountains and the sunset on our big deck. The house is situated on a hillside, with three separate apartments, the bottom is not open to the public, then there is a one bedroom apartment on the second level (the folks staying there pulled in around 8pm tonight) and then the top level is a 2 bedroom, one bath place where we are staying. There is a big open living/dining/kitchen area with lots of windows looking out to the forest and facing west towards the setting sun (thus the name “Sunset House”). We bought the makings for chili and cornbread at the store so we got that going and then sat out on the deck, enjoying the cool mountain air and views. Dinner turned out quite tasty (even with some baking dish improvising for the corn bread). Now everyone is getting ready to turn in for the night (we are all still on East coast time, luckily this works in our favor when we need to be at the visitors center tomorrow before 8:30am and we have an hour and change drive to get there).
So tomorrow, photo walk and tips on how to take “nature photos,” then I think a short day hike of some sort is in order. There’s so much to see, and we have two full days to see it, but for now, as it feels like 11:35pm rather than 8:35, I think it’s time to head to bed.
For our last day in NYC we decided to take advantage of our hotel’s close proximity to the New York Public Library and tour the famous building with all of its gorgeous architecture. They are celebrating their 
If you have never been to MoMA, it is huge! And plan to spend pretty much the entire day there. We started on the top (6th) floor and worked our way down through famous paintings like Van Gough’s “Starry Night”, and Monet’s huge “Water Lilly” paintings along with more eclectic video art pieces, an exhibition on fonts and consumer design (they even had a Vespa), and even an exhibit on “serious video games” used for military training.
We got ready around noon and headed to a local farm that had opened a winery a few years ago and had been rated the best winery in Connecticut for 2010, 
know but they were really good (I got an everything bagel with garden veggie cream cheese, that’s my control case for bagel places, if they do that well, then they’re golden). After breakfast (and coffee for me) we made our way to the 
nearest El stop and hopped on, riding “the Loop” around downtown Chicago to the Field Museum. As we were walking to the museum we went past an interesting, and slightly creepy art installation called “Agora” that had the backdrop of the Chicago skyline, a very cool locale to be sure. Then we were off (after taking some panoramic shots of Chicago from the steps of the museum) to explore the Field Museum.
When you first enter the large atrium/lobby of the museum you are greeted by its most famous resident, Sue, the largest, most complete and best preserved T-Rex. We started on the top floor of the museum with the gemstones, and worked our way around the floor looking at the ancient Asian artifacts, meteorites and more, and realized we’d spent over 2 hours just on that floor…there was no way we were going to be able to get to any other museums that day. So we took our time strolling through the other areas of the museum, past the “Gold” exhibition, the menagerie of stuffed animal specimens from around the world and of course, the dinosaur fossils.
