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.

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.

It was an amazing thing to hear, but we wanted to see it, too. The next day, our last at the hotel, we arrived on the lawn at 8 a.m. to watch the performance. Alas, Marvin had the day off and the flag went up without musical accompaniment.

This left us with another reason to return to the Wawona, among many that had accumulated.

The atmospheric hotel, built in the 1870s, is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. It sits, in its slightly shabby Victorian splendor, a few miles inside the south entrance to Yosemite National Park. From there it’s a good half-hour drive into Yosemite Valley, where much of the action and the most compelling views are.

No doubt there’s much to be said for waking up in the valley, beneath the towering cliffs. But Wawona also has its charms, being a short drive from the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias. It’s also less crowded and less expensive than most of the lodging in the valley.

The hotel has 104 rooms, and we had one of the 50 with shared bathrooms and showers. This worked out fine for us, especially because the hotel provides warm bathrobes for excursions to the spotless bathrooms in the chill of the evening and morning.

The hotel is not luxurious. Some of the rooms are quite small and there is no air conditioning. The buildings are old and the walls are thin. The first floor porch of the main building is pleasant, even elegant, but the second-floor balcony outside the room where we stayed is covered in a most horrendous green outdoor carpet.

In short, people who want the comforts of a Marriott will be better off elsewhere. But if you prefer some atmosphere and character, this may be the place for you.  

The Wawona also has a heated outdoor swimming pool and a lovely dining room with a terrific staff. Dinner is pricey but a very hearty buffet breakfast is included in the cost of the room.

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:

5. Parents watching and photographing a little girl who was hand-feeding potato chips to a squirrel in Yosemite National Park practically underneath a sign asking people not to feed the animals.

4. A woman spritzing herself — and the rest of us — with a spray bottle of smelly suntan lotion on a crowded shuttle bus in Yosemite.

3. Several guests at the Wawona Hotel in Yosemite repeatedly locking and unlocking their cars, early in the morning and late at night, with remote devices that made the cars beep loudly. As if they key itself wouldn’t work.

2. A woman standing on the steps of the Wawona Hotel late in the evening, shouting repeatedly at her husband in the parking lot to “get your butt up here” because she was unhappy with their room assignment.

1. A woman lowering a diapered baby with spit-up all over the front of his life jacket into the hot tub at a resort in Santa Barbara. When she noticed people staring, she wiped the vomit off with her hand — which she then put in the hot tub with the baby.  (I got out right quickly.)

This is no rap on California. I’ve seen a lot worse in my time, like the woman soaping up her dog in the shower of a hotel locker room in Montreal. In fact, my husband and I both thought that Yosemite seemed to bring out the best in people. Or maybe it just brought out the best people.

Still, there’s one in every crowd … and I’m not so sure that it hasn’t sometimes been me.

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.

It’s merely an impression, and an anecdotal one, but it seemed to me that the Europeans were more at leisure than the Americans visiting the park. They seemed more relaxed, more patient and less driven to race from one lookout point to another.

And maybe that’s why they reminded me of the family trips of my youth. We took two consecutive weeks every summer, something that Americans rarely do today. Europeans, who typically get four or more weeks of vacation a year, simply have more time to relax.

We lose so much in that equation. Americans have less opportunity to see and enjoy their own country than foreign vistors do. It’s no wonder that we’ve starved the National Park Service for decades; we have no time to appreciate what it does.

We also have less time to spend time with and appreciate our own families, and that is sadder still.

Maybe when this whole economic crisis steadies up and we start to think about what we want as Americans we can shift our priorities more toward enjoying this beautiful nation and each other.

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.)

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.

Boys were jumping off the rocks into the pool, as boys do, while one girl huddled on a boulder in her dripping swimsuit. “How do you handle this water,” she asked a boy as he splashed by. “You wait until you go numb,” he replied cheerfully.

That’s Yosemite National Park — all about the impact. Millions of visitors have been stunned into speechlessness by the magnificent cliffs, towering waterfalls and massive sequoia for more than 150 years, and it can be assumed that the native Americans who lived there for thousands of years felt the same way.

In the first recorded sightings by non-Indians,  various expeditions of fur trappers passed along the edge of Yosemite Valley on their way to the California coast in the 1830s. They reported seeing a mile-high waterfall and trees more than 100 feet in circumference.

They were a little off on the waterfall — Yosemite Falls is only about half a mile high, but that still makes it one of the tallest waterfalls in the world. They were closer on the trees — some of the giant sequoia in the park measure nearly 100 feet around.

And there’s no need to drag pack mules through snow drifts to see them. All it takes these days is a rented Hyundai and the park shuttle buses.
 
For all its cafeterias, paved trails and millions of visitors a year, the teeming valley still has awesome impact. And not just because it’s big. It’s also magnificent and sublimely beautiful.

I left Yosemite refreshed, and not just by the cold water. I’m not going to be able to write anything more inspiring about it than John Muir did, or take better photographs than Ansel Adams did. I’m just going to suggest you visit Yosemite if you can.

My husband and I had only a few days there, which was not enough, and we’re determined to go back and see more of the park.