Spring Break--Day 4

How is it possible for a fresh-faced, 29 year woman (cough cough) to start the day like this....

and end up like this?*

Well---it kinda goes like this.

We woke up so happily in our gorgeous hotel and had a whoppin' good breakfast (hence the cheery, photo shopped face above). We parked our car at the ferry landing and took the ferry across the bay to SF. The day was sunny, despite warnings of oncoming rain. We caught a cable car around SF and ended up at Ghirardelli Square. Too tired to venture further on foot, we took a different kind of street car to Fisherman's Wharf for lunch.

The whole, "Too Tired to Venture On Foot" kind of became the way of life for the next 24 hours---as you will find out. Being scared that the darkening clouds would actually rain, we returned to the ferry, and then our car. We said goodbye to San Francisco and turned on the navigation system to "fastest route" to Yosemite. Well, people, the traffic was bad. Good thing we had the DVD player, or there would have been blood shed in the back seats of the Denali.

Brielle standing guard at the ferry.
The pesky little sister routine only gets you kicked out of the Cool Girls Club.

You only get his view of San Francisco from the luxury of a ferry!!

Its pretty empowering to be in the center of the city's cable car pully system.
You see this at the Cable Car Museum.

After a somewhat eye-opening experience hanging onto the sides of a cable car, we arrived at Ghirardelli Square. The looming clouds only accentuated the sad construction of the landmark.

See....I'm not kidding! Even the black tarps were a sign of a funeral......

I admit, we were getting pretty exhausted by now. What do you expect of a family that is too attached to their computers and TVs and couches? It was time to sit in the car for a while. Our ride to Yosemite was just the ticket. Did I mention the traffic out of town? We finally blazed a trail through...well, we don't really know where. The road maps would have been more, well, straight. Our navigation system in the car was taking us through Farmland, USA. Even in the dusk, we ooh-ed and aah-ed at the beautiful, simple country. Monica found out the hard way that a belly full of Jelly Bellys would not sit well with switch-back roads climbing up to Yosemite. We can laugh now...but we just wanted to get to our hotel, and that sick girl in back got annoying. Just kidding---ill 15 year olds are easier to deal with. We took away the Jelly Bellys and told her to drink water. She was cool with that.

The Yosemite View Lodge. Pretty sweet location, right?

Okay folks, we have 1 1/2 days left of this journey. If you want to see some WOW-DEE-DOW-DOW sights, stay tuned for tomorrow's post. We stood among the giants....and got our toes got cold and wet.

*And to my siblings-- a warning---I'm totally copyrighting this photo, so you can't take it and blackmail me later. I'm submitting it to all the CSI shows out there as my audition photo. I'm quite sure I'd rock at being a corpse.