Day 14 ... Kings Canyon/Sequoia National Parks and Bakersfield, CA???

Today, we traveled from Yosemite National Park to Kings Canyon & Sequoia National Parks. The drive took us about three hours or so, less time spent in Fresno, CA to do some shopping and access the internet ... something we've been without for the past four nights!

When we arrived in Kings Canyon National Park, we took a short walk through one of the giant Sequoia groves and then continued on to Sequoia National Park. The main attraction here is, of course, the giant Sequoia trees, though the alpine forest scenery here is beautiful even without the giant trees.







It's hard to really appreciate how big these trees are until you see them up close ... they're huge!!! It's unbelievable that anything could grow that big.

After we finished seeing the park, we headed over to our campground which was located in the park. When we got there, the ranger told us that there was an active black bear population in the park and so we would have to put all of our food items in the bear bin at our campsite. I asked if we could keep the cooler in the car, but the ranger said no, and that everything had to be stored in the bin.

This was going to mean a lot of work for us, but we didn't have a whole lot of choice. We went to our campsite to get set up. Unfortunately, the site we were given was located on a fairly steep hillside. Our car was parked about 100 feet uphill from the campsite and the bear bin.

I started to think about how much effort and more importantly, the time it was going to take to move all of our stuff, particularly in the morning when we needed to get going. At that point, I decided that we'd leave the park and try to find a campground outside the park, so we left. On our way driving out of the park, we came across this little guy, attesting to the active bear population!

The road we took leaving the park was an incredibly steep and twisting mountain road. It took us forever to get to the bottom. We continued driving towards Visalia, CA, not finding any "suitable" campgrounds on the way. When we reached Visalia, we went online to see what we could find. At that point, I decided that we'd just drive to Bakersfield, CA and spend the night in a cheap motel, so that's what we did.

It actually worked out very favorably for us, because it cut a LOT of time out of our drive for Day 15, when we head to Las Vegas, NV and Lake Mead.

More on that in the next post!!!