(sorry for all the writing and I have so much to post about our great trip I am going to do it in parts)
We headed down to Yosemite National park Thursday, October 25, and stayed there for three nights. October is a nice time to visit Yosemite because there are a lot less people due to a lack of water in the falls and the weather usually isn't all that warm. Turns our the environment is warming up and we got beautiful weather. It was a little chili at night, somewhere in the upper 20's to low 30's, but our days were a gorgeous 70 degrees or so. God really blessed us with a beautiful weekend. Because of the weather, and less demand, several of the campsites become walk in campgrounds from October to April. This means you can't get a reservation for a camp ground unless you booked in the valley which fills up several months in advance. All that to say we didn't have a camp site but we weren't that worried because hundreds of sights were walk in only and we were going on Thursday.
We were getting ready to head out to Yosemite and Wills had caught a cold and was being really fussy. So I called "Dr grandma Myers" and she told me to call the Dr. just to be safe. I was headed to the store and figured if it worked I would take him. Well they had an appointment at the perfect time. Turns out Wills had an ear infection and we delayed out trip an hour to get some antibiotics...
So we got to the valley around 4:30 and we walked around for awhile and finally decided to drive up to find a camp site. We drove 45 min to find out that the camp ground we were hoping to stay at was closed. By this time it was dark and Wills was getting crabby. We turned around and decided to head to the Wawona camp ground which was another 30 min away from the valley but was better then an hour and a half to the other camp ground. So we finally got to Wawona and there is no ranger manning the camp ground but we saw open campsites, we were so thankful!!! Then we find out that the 6 open sites had these "fake" (meaning not official Yosemite park) reserved signs on them. We headed further into the campground to find that two section of the campground were closed so the only other available site was a group site. We checked our Yosemite guide book which clearly stated "NO RESERVATIONS from October to April" and we decided to stay in one of these "reserved sites." The other motivating factor in staying was that Wills was really tired of being in the car and we were all hungry, no surprise considering it was 8:30 by now. I was so thankful just to be stopped that I slept fine that night not worrying at all if these people were going to show up. Nick thinks he didn't sleep well because he was worried so he woke up at 6:00 ready to go. We packed up the car and headed to Mariposa Grove "the land of the big sequoia's," one of the motivating reasons to camp at Wawona. We hiked around there for a couple hours and then headed down to the valley and back out to Hodgdon Meadows camp ground. Fortunately there were plenty of camp grounds available and we stayed there for the next two nights. Also Hodgdone Meadows is a really nice camp ground. So the rest of our trip continued with out incident for which we were very thankful. We returned home on Sunday and ended up relaxing and preparing for Monday. We were so blessed by God for such a wonderful time to spend as a family just enjoying His creation.

alright so not everyone in our house is use to getting up early

its debatable whether the camera bag still weighs more then the baby or not??

This tree is called "the General" and Nick says it is the biggest tree he has ever seen
Nick standing beside it is a more helpful comparison. Camera's really just can't capture the magnitude of this tree!




Us hanging out in a big tree!

This/these trees are called the faithful couple

I have visited Yosemite many times and never been to Maripose Grove. It was neat for all of us to see a new part of Yosemite

