Yosemite

Yosemite Valley, CA - Sunday 13 October

Went for a walk around the perimiter of Yosemite Valley today, including seeing the falls (largely dormant at this time of the year), and some more spectacular granite mountain scenery. It's the end of the season here, but still pleasantly warm once the sun comes up.

As you might expect, Internet is somewhat hard to come by up here (you'll see this post when I've moved on somewhere else) - it's just about possible to get an e-mail in or out, but the WiFi isn't up to anything else - given the large number of people here and the distinctly satelite-looking uplink, not a huge surprise. It makes me nostalgic for the visits to my grandparents a decade ago, at which point they had no internet access and I didn't have a smartphone. Being cut off can sometimes be for the best!

A tip to any fellow Monzo users - their cards rely on "online authorization", so don't be too surprised if they fail to work in a setting like this, where the card machines may not have a reliable link to "the other end". Most other cards will work (and in fairness, I only experienced the problem once: they clearly reserve a slice of the available bandwidth for card machines).

A tip for anyone driving in the USA: unlike in the UK, where you fill up with petrol and then pay for what you used, over here, you have to buy a specific amount of petrol (in dollars, not gallons) before filling the car up. And hope/ask for a refund if you guess wrong. Fortunately, once you know this is the case, it's not hard to Google for the capacity of your car's tank and do some dead reckoning.