Our Campsite

Since I have so many photos, I decided to break them into categories. First, let me give you a tour of where I stayed this weekend :). 

We stayed at North Pines, which is in the heart of Yosemite. Up until this point, I had only stayed at either Yosemite Lodge or Curry Village, never in a tent. I was a bit (okay, a lot) nervous, mostly because of the idea of bears. I did my research to learn how to be safe, but I was still finding my head filling with images of a bear ripping open our tent to find something that accidentally smelled good. 

Apparently, I overreacted :). We had only one bear incidence, which was when we saw people staring at what we think was a bear off the side of the road. 

We arrived around 2pm, had some lunch, and then got to work setting up our tent. Feast your eyes on this beautiful tent!

This was a gift from my parents, and makes camping an amazing experience. It is over 6 feet tall, so you can easily stand up - the claustrophobic feeling of camping is gone :). This, plus the air mattress my parents also gave us, made it amazing. It was the first time that I went camping and didn't miss my bed at home. Ed and I shared this tent with another couple and it worked great.

While it was a bit crowded, the location couldn't have been beat. Early on in our stay, we discovered that a mere few steps from our campsite, we could see this:

And this

And there were plenty of less well known, but still beautiful sites to behold.

We were close to the river, and could hear it thundering past constantly. The ranger shared with us that just a week before, the river had overflowed and poured out onto the campsite, flooding it completely. We were thankful that the river stayed in its bounds during our trip. 

Next up, Ed and my exploratory run around the valley.