Back from our Yosemite Vacation
Last week Alan and I headed up to Yosemite National Park with my sister and her boyfriend and Robert Green (VSTO MVP and log-time friend) and his wife, Colette. We had an absolutely fabulous time and I recommend that everyone in the world come visit. And believe me, Memorial Day weekend it seems like everyone in the world is doing just that! ;-) Luckily we stayed the whole week so after Sunday people left the valley and we were left with a peaceful vacation.
The falls are full, the Merced river is flowing high and the flowers are all in bloom.
We all agreed that heaven must look something like this. This is the view from inspiration point just as you come through the Wawona tunnel – showing Half Dome at the east end of the Yosemite Valley, El Capitan to the North and Bridal Vail Falls to the South (click to enlarge).
And here’s Half Dome (left), Vernal Falls (lower) and Nevada Falls (upper) from Glacier Point. Stunning. We hiked down the 4-mile trail from Glacier Point down to the valley with views of Yosemite falls (first and fourth picture above) the whole time.
We stayed in a cottage in Yosemite West and did a lot of day hiking and long valley walks. The highlight was Robert, Colette and I hiked 16.4 miles up to the top of Half Dome and back on Tuesday which took us about 10 hours. You hike up to Vernal then Nevada falls first and then a long walk up the John Muir trail through Little Yosemite Valley and cut over onto the Half Dome trail. I’ve done it once before about 15 years ago but I didn’t remember how hard those cables were, especially coming down, but we did it!
Yosemite only takes about 3.5 hours to drive there from my house so I’m already thinking about our next long weekend….
I really enjoyed this vacation.
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About Beth Massi
Beth is a Program Manager on the Visual Studio Community Team at Microsoft and is responsible for producing and managing content for business application developers, driving community features and team participation onto MSDN Developer Centers (http://msdn.com), and helping make Visual Studio one of the best developer tools in the world. She also produces regular content on her blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/bethmassi), Channel 9, and a variety of other developer sites and magazines. As a community champion and a long-time member of the Microsoft developer community she also helps with the San Francisco East Bay .NET user group and is a frequent speaker at various software development events. Before Microsoft, she was a Senior Architect at a health care software product company and a Microsoft Solutions Architect MVP. Over the last decade she has worked on distributed applications and frameworks, web and Windows-based applications using Microsoft development tools in a variety of businesses. She loves teaching, hiking, mountain biking, and driving really fast.
