Essexgirl's Californian Exploits - Part Four: Sequoia and King's Canyon

We had an early start for along drive to Death Valley National Park. Unfortunately when we got to the junction into the park it was closed due to flooding earlier that month. Last time I was in California, (nine years previously) Yosemite had been closed due to flooding, I never knew there was so much rain in the region! According to a local who stopped to re-direct all the lost-looking tourists, a whole section of the park was wiped out and the roads impassable, we needed to go further North and then go round the top of the park and come back down. Effectively this was three sides of a square, but there was nothing we could do but add this extra distance to our journey. Unfortunately most of it was decent highway, so the time was not too horrendous. Although we could only get a taste of Death Valley on this trip (I had been before) it was as hot as I remembered, and the scenery was spectacular in an unusual, almost barren, way. It was coming on for late afternoon as we exited the park. We always knew this would be one of the longest days on the road, sue to having to circumvent the Sierras mountain range, as you could not go through. We hoped to make Bakersfield by early evening. The road was quite long and we were getting low on petrol. The shortest way to Bakersfield was through part of Sequoia Forest, but Ratboy was concerned we could be stuck without any petrol, and that we were better heading further down the highway where there were a few towns. It was along drive and we had seen no petrol stations since Stovepipe Wells in the heart of Death Valley. Eventually we found a place in Mojave, by which time it was dark. We got into Bakersfield late, and with no torch, got quite lost (the local map did not show all roads and was quite misleading - and actually wrong!), this caused a row. We parked up at about 9pm in the RV park and with no inclination to cook, walked to the local Jack-in-the Box for dinner. Bakersfield seemed to be a distribution centre as there were lots of articulated lorries and fast food joints in the area.

The next day, we made a more leisurely start a drove into Sequoia National Park which is also connected to Kings Canyon NP. The roads were windy and narrow, but we saw some spectacular forest scenery and the General Sherman Tree. The Americans claimed this was the world's largest living thing, but I believe that to be the Great Barrier Reef. Anyway, it was a bloody big tree. The roads took us quite high so we got some good views of the park. The little we saw of Kings Canyon was comparatively disappointing. The most disappointing thing of all was that some German tourists in an RV, coming the other way hit our mirror which smashed chucking glass into the cab at the front of the RV (we had the windows down because of all the fabulous fresh air). We cleaned it up and some other RV-ers found us and the Park Ranger was called. As there was nothing we could do that night (the emergency contact given to us by the RV company was an answerphone) we drove to Azalea campground in the park (which was where we had planned to stay anyway) and camped there for the night and I cooked dinner and we played Los Angeles-in-a-box, which I had bought at the Farmer's Market in LA and was basically a LA monopoly rip-off. I beat Ratboy quite easily.

The next day we drove to Fresno to try and get the wing mirror fixed. The breakdown firm we had been given could only get it looked at on the Monday (this was a Saturday). We were not sure what to do and I did not want to miss Yosemite again. Fortunately I spotted an AutoZone which we found had plastic temporary mirrors which would do us until San Francisco, where we were sure we would get something done easier. We carried on into the direction of Yosemite, but due to the intense faffing that morning we were not going to get the park done that day. As the previous night had been spent with no TV, electric or water hook-ups we decided we didn't want that two days in succession. By chance we found a fabulous little RV park called High Sierra just outside in a town called Oakhurst. We took a little ride out to Bass Lake for a few hours before having a relaxing evening and night. The area was 96 degrees centigrade in the afternoon, but went down to 46 degrees that night!