Among all the other things I loved about taking a trip through national parks in California was spending roughly six days without cell phone reception.  No calls.  No texts.  No news app alerts.  If something happened I didn’t know about it, and I didn’t miss a thing.

We had talked long ago about taking some kind of road trip, and coupled with our love of parks and being outside it made sense to take a route that went from Los Angeles, up through Sequoia, Kings Canyon and Yosemite National Parks, and then finishing with stops in Napa (Wine National Park?) and San Francisco.

Sequoia was at the top of my list of parks I wanted to see.  Specifically, I wanted to stand among trees I had only seen on Instagram.  Turns out I really I no appreciation for the magnitude of the place.  There was Tunnel Rock:

A pretty tough, but short hike up Moro Rock that was quite nice after being in the car for a while:

Tunnel Log sounded like an interesting stop, and it was just down the road, so we had to go, right?  Now we can say we drove through a tree.

Now, the upright trees.  I’ve you’ve never seen a sequoia in person, let me advise you to do that as quickly as possible.  Think about the biggest other tree you’ve seen and multiply that several times.  They are MASSIVE.  We quickly relied heavily on the panorama function of our cameras just to try to capture what we were experiencing.  For scale, I am a tall human:

Sequoias are remarkable.  They are kind of spongy to the touch, something we learned comes from air pockets in the bark that along with high branches help protect them from wildfires.  So many of the trees we saw had been burned at some point in the past few hundred years, but another thing the trees do is basically shield themselves with new growth.  Our new mantra when things get tough: I am a sequoia.

We did some amazing hikes during our trip, but among our favorites was Tokopah Falls in Sequoia.  It was not easy, especially since we’re not used to the altitude, but we gave ourselves all afternoon to do it, and it was spectacular.

Next we made the short drive up to Kings Canyon National Park, a place that made us say “Woahhhhhhhhhhhhh” more than any other we visited.  It has its own famous set of Sequoia trees in the Grant Grove:

We loved starting a day exploring here.  It was very much not crowded, which made for a peaceful stroll among our new friends.  We even got to go through some long-fallen sequoias:

Sometimes we had to give our necks a break and appreciate the trees the best way possible (we would have taken long naps in this position if we had more time):

We hopped in the car and had an experience neither of us will ever forget driving down into the canyon itself.  It took about an hour, slowed by our frequent need to pull over and marvel at what we were seeing.  And the peace.  What peace.  This video has sound, I promise, it’s just that standing there we couldn’t hear anything at all:

Once down at the bottom we went on a hike, managed to avoid seeing any bears but did survive what we’re calling a snake attack (a small black snake we noticed on the trail at the last second).  We loved Zumwalt Meadow and really want to go back at a warmer time to swim at Muir Rock:

This is also the park to visit if you love the calming sound of running water.  A sample from various spots:

Our final park stop was Yosemite National Park, where, you may guess, they also have big trees (and big tree chairs)!

Our first day there was sort of planned as a slower one, but we were very happy about that.  We did an easy morning hike, had lunch at our lodging spot (Big Trees Lodge), explored a pioneer village and did another pretty easy hike before dinner.  Then we were able to enjoy an evening playing Phase 10 and having drinks on the lodge’s front porch.  We stayed in a cottage built in 1894:

Yosemite Valley is the star of the park.  Look at how you’re welcomed:

We spent our second day in the park checking out Bridalveil Falls, Yosemite Falls (a little totally dry this time of year) and the beautiful Cook’s Meadow:

After lunch came our biggest challenge of the entire trip, hiking our way up to Vernal Falls.  It was HARD.  Seriously hard.  But we did it and it was so worth it:

In planning the trip we kind of slotted certain things into days to see how they would work, and on our final day in Yosemite we planned to just be there in the morning.  That meant one last epic hike to cap the national parks part of the itinerary, and we picked Taft Point as our target.  Like the drive into Kings Canyon, this was a WOW spot, unlike anything we’ve ever seen before with its sheer drops and front row seat to see El Capitan.

We could have spent all day marveling at it all, and like Grant Grove we were pleasantly surprised to have the place almost to ourselves.

Why did we have to leave?  Well, we had a few hours of driving to do in order to get to Napa where our dinner reservation was pretty much the only time in the course of nine days that we had to be somewhere at a particular time.  We realllllly enjoyed our B&B called Beazley House where we had the original master bedroom with a working fireplace and of course some wine.

It took me forever to sift through the many, many, many (400+) winery options for the one tour and tasting we had put on our schedule.  We were lucky that process took us to Materra.  We had a private tour after being greeted at the car with a glass of wine, tasted some grapes and learned a lot from our dedicated guide who was happy to explain to the relative wine novices we are.

From there, it was on to being in complete, 100 percent tourist mode in San Francisco.  We did everything one might think, including taking one of those hop-on, hop-off bus tours, eating sundaes at Ghirardelli and riding the cable car.

We even found the most incredible putt putt golf place.  It was indoors and each hole was themed after a different San Francisco landmark, including many we had already visited and even a final amazing hole shaped like the city’s baseball stadium.

And finally, our last day coincided with the last day of the Major League Baseball regular season, and since the Giants were in town we went to see them play the Los Angeles Dodgers.  We sat on the McCovey Cove side of beautiful AT&T Park and were lucky enough to see someone hit a home run in the water!  Plus we got our picture taken by the big glove.

It was the kind of trip where all throughout we couldn’t believe we had only been on vacation for X number of days.  Surely it had been twice as long.  And yet, we also felt like we weren’t packing our days or rushing anything.  We have more national parks to see and baseball stadiums to visit.  For now we’ll just think about the peace we felt and the smell of those sequoias.

(We took so many pictures I couldn’t include them all.  Many more from the parks are on my Flickr page.)