Sierran Adventures

Your clamours to learn what I did 2 Fridays ago have not reached deaf ears. The hard part is writing 2 week old news when I have current things to post as well! Which gets priority? And since I'm generally so unmotivated to blog, it's usually an either-or type decision. But this time I have the opportunity to combine both the old and the new in a single blog, which even has a unified theme! Both that Friday's fun and my Thanksgiving trip occured in the Sierra Nevada: that much-sung mountainous backbone of California.

Snow play!! Two weekends ago Jenny and her labrador retriever Shasta came to visit. Jenny seems to always travel with Shasta, whenever possible. She's convinced that Shasta and Mitzi miss each other, and that Shasta and Ozzie will become friends. Mitzi, Ozzie, and I categorically deny those beliefs. Well, Shasta probably misses Mitzi, and definitely wants to befriend both Mitzi and Ozzie, but they're cats and would prefer to have nothing to do with her.

Friday was a beautiful day, and I didn't have anything that I absolutely had to do, so we decided to get out of the house (rescue the cats for a little while) and the Central Valley and go up to Tahoe for the day! The ski season started early this year with a few early blizzards, and while we weren't going to go skiing, we figured this meant we'd have plenty of snow to play in! Shasta didn't move to California till last spring, so we figured that there would be more snow at Tahoe than she'd ever seen in the sum total of her Georgia winters! And we were right! We popped out to play at Emerald Bay, where there was about a foot of snow. It was super fun! And super funny!! Shasta hopped around in the snow like an old pro snowshoe hare. We hadn't brought any of her toys with us, unfortunately, so we threw snowballs for her to chase. Silly Shasta is so hellbent on retrieving, that she kept digging in the snow, searching for the snowball, until we made another and convinced her that we'd found it. Then we walked a little ways through the snow-closed campground and I made a goofy looking snowman. He had pine cone sunglasses and a mustache. After only an hour of bounding around Shasta was completely exhausted. She slept soundly all the way back home, and returned well rested to terrorize the cats =P.

Unturkey day!! Yesterday I returned from two "thankful" days in Yosemite. Jenny's created a tradition of having Thanksgiving with her crazy friends at Cherry Lake, where she lived the summer she worked at Yosemite. This year she made us have a vegan Thanksgiving feast. This mostly only affects the turkey, which was substituted with unturkey: an interesting concoction of wheat gluten which has been engineered to have not only stuffing, but skin as well. It was ok... But I have to say I don't understand vegetarians who eat fake meat products. I'm perfectly fine with vegetarianism. I certainly have vegetarian tendencies, and in Texas I qualify as a full fledged vegetarian... And vegetarian food is often very yummy. So if you're going to give up meat, why eat pseudo-meat? Everybody said the unturkey tasted like turkey, but I disagree... It didn't really taste like turkey, and the texture was pretty far off. I would have much preferred an authentic vegetarian meal that wasn't trying to be meaty. Like tofu stirfry, or vegetarian lasagna or something. Who needs turkey, or unturkey, or tofurky? Maybe next year...

I won't even begin to describe the conversations we had. They were delightfully inappropriate, especially for a goody-two-shoes American holiday like Thanksgiving. Suffice it to say that it was decided to be not only vegan, but also a lesbian Thanksgiving. As a result, everyone present was a priori declared to be a lesbian, gender and marital status notwithstanding. =D

On Friday we went down to Yosemite Valley. Despite being constantly full of annoying, moronic tourists, Yosemite Valley really is breathtaking. We took a short hike to the top of Vernal Falls via the Mist Trail, and looped our way back down on the John Muir Trail. The Mist Trail characterizes the atmosphere of the whole Valley, really. It's very short (maybe only 1.5 miles), so plenty of people think they can do it when they really shouldn't. So it's full of idiots wearing inappropriate footwear, not carrying water, what-have-you. But it's actually very steep, having to climb 1000 feet in that short distance. In fact, it's so steep that most of the upper part of the trail is a stairway along the cliffside. But it's an amazing hike directly alongside the Falls (it's not called Mist for nothing!), which affords splendid views, making it all worth it. The John Muir Trail is much gentler, and also much, much less crowded, which is why I advocated it for the return route. I caught some flak from the others since my "gentle trail down" started out with a climb. But it was gentle uphill, and got us some really incredible views of Vernal Falls from above and Nevada Falls further up, which we wouldn't've seen at all otherwise. So I stand by my trail. And we still made it down before it was completely dark, though probably the sun had set below the valley top already.

That night it snowed! Fortunately it wasn't enough to strand us there, and everyone made it back to civilization on schedule.

Check out photos of both Sierra adventures in my November album.

Right now I'm baking gingerbread dinosaur cookies to help me fatten up for winter =D.

Sock of the day!! Turquoise crew socks with a scandinavian snowflake pattern around the cuff.