I will probably never tire of this view, so I served it mercilessly to our visitors as well.

At he edge of the sun-burnt desert, our little wooden town dwells...

I thought that if we set out on Friday afternoon, we would manage to slip out of the Bay before the evening jam happens, but I was wrong. Time in the morning, which I had devoted to checking goat pen's rework, we later lacked in the mountains. We reached Strawberry after almost five hours — it usually takes us three and half — and I had to order a dining stop. We had been playing audio books during our journey (InCryptid series by Seanan McGuire), but even so there was much traffic stress. Leavitt Meadows appeared with dusk; fortunately the lower campsite was now, by the end of the season, dry and available, and we did not have to figure out any alternatives, and encamped in peace. The end of the season also brought negative effects — the Marines had removed their convenient port-a-potties, forcing us to squat behind bushes. And since days got properly shorter, we would go to sleep early, but nobody minded that. With no real electricity available, your sleeping bag sees you with the chickens. But still, to stretch our legs after a half-day sitting in the car, we hiked up to the viewpoint over Leavitt — by then it was dark and we puzzled for a relatively long moment, why would anyone keep their head-lights on in the meadow? After some ten minutes we realized the crazy shine behind a grove was the Moon, reflecting in the river.

Local (historic) fire station.

A modern car (not even hundred years old).

We had planned Bodie for Saturday — a gold-mining ghost town, which had accommodated ten thousand people in 1880 and sported sixty five bars, where gold miners could spend their hard-earned wealth on alcohol, opium, loose women, or gambling in dens. Undertaker was the town's busiest professional — he dealt with one murdered person a day on average. During subsequent forty years all gold was extracted, town got raked by a fire — and people deserted this inhospitable high desert place. Often carrying only what they wore on their persons of managed to load on a horse — and thus in the remaining hundred and seventy houses, you can see not only period furniture, but also dishes, clothing, and other artifacts of regular life. It's a completely different category of a historic monument, contrasting with sterile cathedrals of Europe — and thus we recommend it to all our visitors.

Mono Lake.

Pepe.

I've got a much less lofty story from Bodie for you. When I needed to use an outhouse there, I put my mobile phone down on a box with toilet paper, being an old hand at this, to prevent it from otherwise inevitably dropping from my back pocket into the pit of said facility. Eventually, I marched back to my car, found a snack, and waited for Pepe and Sarah, who enjoyed Bodie with a greater deliberation than I. Having noticed my missing phone only after another half hour, then rushing back to the port-a-potties, I got stopped by a group of people, who (correctly) concluded that I must be the right person who had left her phone in the booth. Fortunately for me, they had also logically concluded that if they wait a bit, I would return for it, so they did not figure to carry the phone off to deposit it at some office. (There is no phone signal/service in Bodie, which preempts possibilities of seeking the phone or the owner by calling from/to it.)

Visitors need to get on horse back.

Sarah and Oggi.

From Bodie we drove to the northern rim of Mono Lake, which sports a beautiful park with benches and picnic tables, and from which a wooden path leads to the edge of the lake with a view to a few tufas. There we sat down and chatted, and walked the path. It was funny that we met the group from Bodie again, who had found my phone. Driving to the southern lake end ensued, to join thousands of tourists there, walking the most famous tufa exhibit. Only Pepe went along with me there, as Sarah got hit by a case of jet-lag and apparently altitude sickness (we live at sea level, Leavitt Meadows are above seven thousand feet, Bodie is above eight thousand feet, Mono at some six thousand), and we had to leave her behind with head aches, indigestion, coffee and pills at the car.

Our original plan included ascending the Panum Crater, but given the prevailing heat and Sarah's head ache, we opted for retreat to Whoa Nellie's Deli. They have not only coffee there, sandwiches and burgers, but also decent draft beer and lures like teriyaki sesame seared tuna sashimi. Given the fact that Pepe's colleagues had scared her with stories about getting horribly fat in America from eating exclusively McDonald hamburgers, we had to take a picture of this menu item — with a note that this was an American gas station fare (yes, Nellie's Deli is a gas station cafeteria). By the way, my phone rescuers reappeared again; they must have copied my itinerary.

Hot bath.

Crazy cold and windy.

We crawled into our sleeping bags more or less with dusk again — on the following day, our high-point awaited — a horse-back ride to Secret Lake. I was a bit worried that I would get issued Roscoe and experience another rodeo, but got Splash instead. A (new to the pack station) wrangler told me that it was a spooky horse; my impression after first twenty minutes was that he was not spooky but that he had a bad sight. He turned his head here and there and — understandably — reacted more sensitively to sounds (I frightened him most by wheezing suddenly). Otherwise Splash offered a nice ride, and is an old guard, having lived at the station for years. Which showed in tricks he tried, pretending to scratch just to surreptitiously grab a bite of green grass. It was interesting that when returning him, his owner confirmed Splash to truly have a bad sight. Proves I'm not crazy.

After horses, I ordered us into hot springs — I felt it was time to perform a bit of personal hygiene, especially after having sweated on horses riding through clouds of dust. I was secretly hoping that by this time of late Sunday afternoon, Buckeye would be less beleaguered, but there were several groups hoping for the same thing. When I spotted the mass occupation of the lower pools by the river, we slid into upper springs near a parking lot. We spared ourselves ugly descent and climb of a ravine, and had more privacy there. Upper pools cool faster on colder days, but on a sunny September day they had the perfect temperature. As a full stop of a beautiful sentence of a day I decreed a visit to Mountainview BBQ in Walker, where we overstuffed ourselves on Texas spuds (with meat, sour cream and green onion), and topped it off by a strawberry short-cake (with ice cream).

Obsidian rocks on crater's rim.

Black glass.

Monday morning was very windy, but sunny. Even so I was glad we had ridden horses in the still weather of the day before; wind makes horses nervous. Then we packed our stuff and tried for a second round at Mono Lake, this time with Sarah. Then we chose a polar expedition to Panum Crater — two days earlier, it was too hot for the crater, and now a crazy wind howled and it was too cold despite our windbreakers — desert climate in full display.

Meanwhile, a caffeine withdrawal syndrome announced itself — imagining to have to drive through whole Yosemite and continue home, I forced the girls to Nellie's for coffee. And to worm up a bit, I ordered chilli fries — thinking it was a breakfast portion, but even with Sarah's and Pepe's help I could not finish it.

Tioga Pass.

Half Dome.

We got out of the car in Tioga Pass, to take pictures of local pools, and then, natrually stopped at Olmstead Point, with a view to Half Dome. By then gusts of wind were so strong that it was a problem at times keeping the vertical. Furthermore, traffic was surprisingly heavy — horrible jams prevailed despite this being a Monday. Past Olmstead Point we got caught in a closure alternating traffic in one and then the other direction. It was the last spot with wind but also sunshine. A bit past North Dome it started raining, slowing all traffic to walking pace. I reckoned that in those conditions (cars crawling, poor visibility) our visitors would hardly ever see El Capitan. Even so, our way home got quite long, nevertheless improved by a stop in Mexican El Agave.

Visitors may not appreciate a locally unusual natural phenonmenon - it RAINS in California!

Golden Gate in fog.

As soon as we descended from the mountains, the wind stopped and we found ourselves again in boringly dry California autumn. And since it was necessary to boringly spend time with family and schools and goats again, we sent our visitors off to a three-day stay in Monterey, while we caught up what "got neglected" again. On the following weekend we took our visitors on a car trip around the Bay — across Golden Gate, which defeated us by hiding in fog, across Richmond bridge to the eastern side, and there to Alameda, to see USS Hornet. In Alameda, we had to get extracted from a navigational trap by a random bystander — we just could not figure out how to find an entrance to an underwater tunnel in the maze of local one-way-streets, detours and closures.

Air carrier USS Hornet had served since 1943, having participated in actions of second world war in the Pacific. In 1969 Hornet pulled up aboard astronauts of Apollos 11 and 12, and was finally decommissioned in 1970. Today she anchors at Alameda, and acts as a floating museum. And if you're lucky, it can happen that your guide would possessively mention "his" Combat Information Center and "his" flight controllers. We were this lucky this time, thus we spent many hours aboard Hornet, until they closed — and still we probably missed much.

On flight deck of USS Hornet.

Hangar.

Then on Tuesday I just loaded Pepa and Sarah up, and dropped them off in San Francisco, for their trip back home. This one was such a pleasant visit, because it just merged with our lives, and besides a greater number of coffee mugs in the dishwasher, we actually never encountered any big waves in our family routine. Therefore we home that our visitors, too, had fun during their vacation — the girls covered a lot of ground — balloons and horses, ocean, sequoias, mountains, lakes, a volcanic crater, a gold-mining camp, a mission, museums, a lighthouse, an aquarium, and an aircraft carrier. Quite a few things, in less than four weeks, is it not?

And as is the custom, you can find more pictures in the gallery.