Curry Village, Yosemite Valley, CA - Saturday 12 October


Mountains surrounding the valley

Not much to say about Yosemite at this point, except that the drive in was pretty spectacular. I left SF around 8AM to avoid the traffic in the city, and the rest of the journey was pretty straightforward highway/freeway travel

The Nissan Versa seems up to the job. It has a fairly un-lovely automatic gearbox, which seems prone to being "caught by surprise" when you are operating at low speed or suddenly accelerate, but apart from that it gets the job done. The cruise control isn't as good as I'm used to on my Ford back home: it doesn't have a dashboard read-out of the set speed, so you just have to make a mental note for the times when it's catching up or overshot.

Needless to say, as a Brit driving on the "wrong" side of the road for the first time, I'll take any automatic gearbox over none - the idea of trying to change gear with the other arm on top of everything else is too complicated to seriously consider.

The steering wheel controls for the audio do make sense, though.

As for where I'm staying tonight (and tomorrow), I have myself a "tent cabin", fortunately of the heated variety (it gets pretty cold in the valley overnight).