Today was another travel day. Sophia spent the night at Linda and Chris’ last night again. Cameron, Tanya and I stayed in the trailer. The trailer crew got up and spent some time getting ready to leave town, then we headed over to Linda’s.
Linda and Chris made some great blueberry pancakes and bacon. After breakfast, we visited for a little bit then Cameron, Sophia and Linda picked blackberries. We wrapped up our visit at their house with Sophia showing us some bunnies and several of the local birds then we took some group photos.
We made the quick drive back to our campsite and buttoned everything up. We said our last goodbyes to Chris & Linda then hit the road.
Armed with my new “first gear is best” Pine Mountain Club knowledge, the trip down the mountain was much easier than the drive up (the grades are also more kind leaving their place).
One thing we’ve learned with big travel days is that it’s really tough to fit anything else in. Today we had planned 6-7 hours worth of traveling. With the packing up at the beginning of the day and the setting up at the end of the day (plus eating and all the normal surviving kinds of things), it’s really tough to do anything else. While it’s not a hard requirement, I really like to get to our new campsite during daylight (it’s way easier and way more safe, I think). One of the big gotcha’s with only traveling on travel days is that it cuts back on other important things like visiting with family & friends. Anyway – food for thought. I think for us, this might mean we’ll plan an extra day at some stops to make sure we get in all the things we want to do instead of being rushed. Travel days are generally not that fun, so spreading them out is probably a win overall.
We made it to Spot #7 just as the sun set. Indian Flat RV Park in El Portal, CA (Campsite #126) — just outside Yosemite National Park’s Yosemite Valley. We’ve stayed in Yosemite Valley several times before in travel trailers and love it, but, despite trying for probably 3 months, no sites in the National Park opened up that would fit our trailer. We looked at several campgrounds fairly near the park, but Indian Flat was what we decided as the best compromise between location, cost and previous reviews.
Indian Flat has quite a few bad reviews online, but most of them are about the business-specific parts of the campground instead of the campground itself. Their website is old school 1990’s vintage in appearance and doesn’t have any reservation system built in. They list a phone number and email — but we got zero response from either. I tried to call for about a week, but no one ever answered the phone. I left one message the first day I called, but I still haven’t gotten a call back. No one answered my email either.
I finally got the campground on the phone yesterday and they had a site for us. They didn’t have any full hookup sites, but we did get one with 50A electricity and water hookups. We had to ask one of our neighbors to move his truck so that we could get in, but we got the trailer parked and everything set up without any other issues.
We’re planning on sleeping in tomorrow and making it a low key day with a visit to Yosemite Valley and maybe a trip to Mariposa or Merced. Yosemite is my favorite National Park. The last time we were here, the twins were 4. Since that’s a little young for crystal clear long term memories, I really wanted to do another visit to make sure they remembered its beauty. Yosemite is an amazing place.
