Yosemite, CA

Yosemite, CA

Sunday, 19. May 2013

 

What a delicious breakfast!

At 8am our host presented us with a breakfast good enough for bears; blueberries, raspberries, blackberries mixed with eight different types of nuts and seeds. That’s all you need to really fill you up till lunch and is a super healthy start to the day. Even Franca, who struggles to get up early, found her way to the table in time for this. This amazing breakfast we enjoyed at Michael’s in Santa Cruz. He is a good friend of Hans, one of our sponsors. Hans has parked his truck here at Michael’s and has said we can borrow it for our time here on the west coast. We had no idea what kind of truck this might be, but it is definitely big enough. On the first day we wanted to drive into town but parking proved more of a problem than we had imagined, so we drove back and walked into town. Meanwhile we are getting a lot better at it and as we can also sleep in the back, this will be great for our trips from now on.

With a cooker, tent and some food we went on a two day hiking trip around the Hetch Hetchy. Hetch Hetchy is a reservoir which supplies all of San Francisco with drinking water. The walk did us both good and cleared our heads. It was also nice to see that we were not as unfit as we thought. As everyone uses a car for shopping, the beach or evenings out, we thought we’d lost a lot of our fitness. Being active and sporty is something that we really enjoy. We walked under giant waterfalls and camped high up on the rocks in an area with a large number of bears. The bears leave people alone as long as you hang your food, rubbish and toiletries high up in a tree away from the tent, or put it in a secure container. Yesterday evening after lots of calculating we worked out that we could have done this round trip of 27 miles (approx. 39km) including three high mountains, by foot in a day, but that would have needed more careful planning.

Now we are on way towards Colorado where we will be visiting two glass makers in the mountains. One of them learned how to make glass at Jan-Erik Ritzman’s who we visited in Sweden; the other one is a good friend of our host back in Corning, NY. We’re really looking forward to visiting their studios, as this will be glass making in the middle of the wild outdoors – what could be better!