Video: Bridalveil Fall, Yosemite National Park

I posted a photo of Bridalveil Fall in my Yosemite photo gallery a while back, but it takes a video to show how it got its name:

I clipped the video just before a guy in a baseball hat walked in front of it and started shouting back at his family. It was amusing but it wouldn’t be fair to leave it in because I’m quite certain he hadn’t noticed my camera.

This video was shot, by the way, with my inexpensive, trusty and slightly battered Canon PowerShot SD450 atop a Gorillapod tripod.

Yosemite’s Wawona Hotel Is A Charming Throwback

We were still lying in bed at the Wawona Hotel in Yosemite National Park when we heard someone outside whistle “The Star-Spangled Banner” from start to finish, with perfect pitch and clarity.

The whistler, we later learned, was Marvin, who has worked at the hotel for 20 years. He whistles the anthem as he raises the flag on the front lawn, and he has so perfected the performance that he finishes the song  just as the flag reaches the top of the pole.

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Bad Tourist: Five Thoughtless Things I Saw On Vacation

When I travel, I am a student of human behavior, which is to say I mutter complaints about the things people do that I don’t like. Line cutting is a big one. I hate that.

I recently spent a week on vacation, including a few days (not enough) at Yosemite National Park, where someone apparently behaved so badly that it set something of a record. I didn’t witness it, though. We were off in the park when fellows guests at the Wawona Hotel set off a canister of bear repellent in their room, shutting down the hotel for several hours. These guests, we were told, abandoned most of their gassed belongings and took off.

This gave me the idea of cataloguing the rude things that travelers do in a new feature I shall call Bad Tourist. So here goes the first installment of the five most obnoxious things I actually saw people doing on that trip:

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Getting Back To Nature, Vacations And Our Families

Your faithful blogger wades in Tenaya Creek.

My husband and I spent part of last Tuesday afternoon splashing around Tenaya Creek in Yosemite National Park under the looming splendor of  Half Dome.

Our only company was a young French family, the parents in swimsuits floating lazily with a naked toddler boy and a little girl stripped down to her underwear. It reminded me of nothing more than the idyllic summer camping trips I took as a child with my large family, although being American I guess we probably wore more clothes.

Throughout the park I saw families that reminded me, in attitude if not in size, of my own family in the 1960s and the 70s. And those families were almost all European. Everywhere we went, we heard Italian, French, German and languages I couldn’t identify, as well as British and Australian accents.

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Photo Gallery: Yosemite National Park

I just posted a new gallery from last week’s trip to Yosemite National Park in California:

Half Dome at sunset from Glacier Point, Yosemite National Park.

(You can view large versions of the photos in a gallery by clicking on the first photo and hitting the “next” link under each photo.)

Yosemite National Park Stuns The Senses

It just didn’t seem plausible in the blazing August heat that the water flowing over Yosemite Falls came from some glacier higher up in the Sierra Nevada, but jumping into the icy pool beneath the lower falls removed all doubt.

Refreshing doesn’t begin to describe it. The cold hit me like a hammer. I lasted about 45 seconds before I clambered, shivering, back into the 95-degree heat.

I should not have doubted the glacier story. Rangers don’t  lie.

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