Oh sweet Sun

Since Frans wrote our last update, we've been blessed with sun, sun and some more sun. This has yielded some inevitable results. Jasper is already more tanned than I will ever get. Frans seems to be incapable of getting sunburned but he's slowly becoming a pretty blondine. My skin is peeling off.

We happened to be in Yosemite NP at the beginning of National Park Week, which meant that people who normally can't be bothered to go there decided to take there dog for a walk, go biking (or whatever they call biking here) and occupy every single square metre of the park. We managed to find a pretty terrific hike though (pictures on picasa https://picasaweb.google.com/thehoffmeister42), which ended at the video in our last post. Because that was our first really sunny day, we didn't have sunscreen on us, so by the time we got back down, Frans couldn't look at me without laughing. My clowns nose was gone pretty soon, but there is still skin peeling off my arms and neck.

After Yosemite, we decided to go and see some really big trees in Sequoia NP. We found a place to spend the night really close to the park entrance (we got a discount for being Dutch, hurray) where we could hear some horny bulls calling. We never saw any bulls though, and next morning we were wondering where in the world they were when the owner of the campsite came over to chat with us about being Dutch and told us there were no bulls around. We'd been listening to bull frogs all the time.

Sequoia NP was a fairly big disappointment. There were some big trees, but they weren't nearly as impressive as the Redwoods and there was ~3.5m of snow to make sure there was no way in the world we could go hiking. So we drove on and took a shower in the river instead.

Sequoai was our last view of the high mountains for a while, and we left for Lake Isabella, an artificial lake with a free campsite, where for the first time since the Nightmare of Chillwack we camped on the same site for more than one night. Even though the mountains weren't really high anymore, we could still do some serious hiking and reached some pretty cool  vista points.

Tomorrow we'll be frying our asses of in Joshua Tree NP and then we're on our way to Phoenix and the Grand Canyon!