Moving and Yosemite

So now that the big news is out, I can continue to play catch up on our other life posts. Rewind to early August....

GOODBYE LITTLE ITALY, HELLO UNIVERSITY HEIGHTS

As many of you know, we have been living in downtown San Diego in the Little Italy neighborhood since we moved out here in April 2010. We have really loved our time there but we were bursting at the seams in our tiny one bedroom and we had had enough of the train horns. So the second week of August, we said goodbye to our awesome bay view and little apartment and packed up and headed 10 minutes NE to a little neighborhood called University Heights. Here is a picture from our last night in our apartment - fireworks! What a great way to say goodbye. 

Here is our apartment all packed up. Aww, it is sad to move sometimes!

Our new place is a two bedroom, two bath, two level condo (with a skinny garage!) on a quiet little palm tree lined street. The bottom floor has the garage, the spare bedroom and a bathroom and the upstairs has our bedroom and bath, a living room with high vaulted ceilings, and a galley kitchen. Before we moved in Joey pulled some late nights painting the accent walls. Here he is in our living room painting our bright blue wall. 

Here is a view from the other way. You can see our little patio, our dining area with our bright-yellow green wall, and the start of our kitchen. 

He also painted the walls in our bedroom. This took an especially long time because the walls were an awful brown that required several coats. 

We decided to hire movers to make our life a little easier and to try to make sure that some of our nicer furniture wasn't damaged. Well, that was a total bust. We hired a local company with great reviews but I guess we just got unlucky. We had two guys that were pretty old who complained the entire time about how many days they had worked and how bad their back hurt. They were SO slow and sad looking. I felt like we should help them because we are younger and stronger! They told us it would take 3-4 hours to move everything (remember, we had a tiny one bedroom and were completely pre-packed) but it ended up taking 9 hours! Yes, 9!!! Unbelievable! 

And what was worst of all, is that they did a terrible job! They chipped our bookshelf, dented our wall, scratched our floors, put our bed back together wrong - missing an entire board! AND dropped fragile boxes. Here is our dish box on arrival. Not good.

Luckily, I packed our dishes really well and only one bowl and the crockpot was broken. So much for hiring professionals! Joey is still trying to get our money back so we'll see. 

Eventually, the job was done and we had all our stuff in our new place. We didn't have any living room furniture yet though because we sold our old couch and were waiting on our new one to be delivered.

Later that week our couch came and posed a challenge in itself. Apparently we were supposed to measure the doorway before purchasing a couch, which never occurred to me, and our couch was too big to fit in the doorway. Luckily, the delivery guys were crafty and were able to hoist the couch in through the balcony from the top of their truck. Whew!

Our next priority was to get a grill ASAP. We had missed our grill so much the last few years so we couldn't wait! That first weekend we went and bought one and cooked up some steaks and zucchini. Yum!

We really love our new place. The neighborhood is so quiet and we love having so much more space. The only downside has been the heat. We realized when house shopping that very few places actually have AC so we figured that it must be fine to just keep the windows open and use fans - and I think it usually is but we are having an unusually hot summer. The first few weeks in our place we had record temperatures for SD in the 80s and 90s. I was melting! Luckily it has been cooling down but we keep getting random uncomfortably hot days. I can't wait for them to go away for good! 

We are almost done decorating now so I know I should post pictures of the place but I'm too lazy to do it now. Maybe in a future post. Or maybe you'll just have to come visit! We have a spare room with it's own bathroom! You are welcome any time! 

LABOR DAY IN YOSEMITE

A few weeks later it was Labor Day weekend. We were still living out of boxes and knew that we should take the holiday to get settled in our place but we just couldn't fight the urge to take advantage of the long weekend to go to Yosemite. On Friday, we left work at noon and drove 8 hours north towards the park. I was a little nervous about the trip because I was about 10 weeks pregnant and I had been having pretty terrible nausea daily that was made worse by driving, and I wasn't sure how I'd feel hiking and camping - but we decided to risk it anyways. The drive up was uneventful and beautiful as always, and for the most part I felt ok with the help of a few well timed stops.

Friday night we spent the night in a hotel 2 hours south to get a good night's rest and woke up early on Saturday and headed into the park. As we drove towards the valley, we started to get great views of Yosemite's grand attractions - El Capitan, Half Dome, the falls (or where the falls would be if there was any water). Here are a few shots from our first pull off. Beautiful, isn't it?

We headed into the valley and prepped for a hike. Gotta lather up! 

We decided to do a relatively short hike to test my endurance and chose the Mist trail by Vernal Falls to the top of Nevada Falls - about 5-6 miles. This is also the first part of the much longer and more dangerous Half Dome trail. 

The scenery was beautiful. So green and lush!

For a "moderate" hike, there sure was a lot of steep uphill climbing. At parts it was reminiscent of the Inca trail - all those stairs! 

Here we are taking a little break at Vernal Falls, where we got a great shot of a rainbow!

We continued upward to the top of Nevada Falls and it was a great view! There were also a lot open granite areas that reminded me of Stone Mountain. Very cool. 

At the top we took a little goldfish break. Gotta love goldfish. 

Then it was a long and steep 3 miles back down to the trailhead. I was wiped by the end of it! I think we chose just the right length and difficulty. Back at the trailhead, we hopped on a park bus to go back to our car. On the way, we saw a group of people staring at something in the middle of a field. It was a black bear trying to climb a tree! Joey was so excited that he convinced me in my exhausted state to hop off the bus for a closer look. Can you see the bear?

How about now? Joey took a gazillion pictures and a lot of them turned out pretty good. The bear was about 20 yards away and was minding his own business. We weren't scared at all because we were in a group of about 30 people standing there watching him and there were rangers there. 

As you can see they tag the bears in the park with a number and collar to keep track of them. So after the bear photo shoot, we drove to our campsite and set up for the night. One of the first things I noticed were the massive bear boxes for food storage. As we saw earlier, there are a lot of black bears in the park and they WILL get into any food that is left unattended, even locked in your car. They take this very seriously around here and we weren't about to test it! 

We set up our little campsite and made some burgers and broccoli - way better than our backpacking dinners!

Joey even enjoyed some Yosemite park beer. 

And of course, we enjoyed a campfire. 

The next morning we made some eggs and headed out for some more hiking and exploring. 

Our first stop was a stroll through a sequoia grove. 

They were pretty cool but not as impressive as the ones we saw over Memorial Day. Although I did find a really giant pine cone!

Then we took a windy (aka - nauseating) drive through the park to Glacier Point. It was crazy crowded but there were definitely some great views. Here is a particularly good one of Half Dome. 

And a great panoramic with Joey. 

Next, we went on a short hike to Taft point to see the fissures. It was essentially a cliff with no guard rails where you can look over into the abyss and scare the crap out of yourself. I tend to be a little riskier than Joey when it comes to cliffs on hikes so I crawled right up to the edge to get a peek. Joey kept his distance a little more. 

He felt much more comfortable in the little section with a railing.

And again, great views.

To round out the day we went back down to the valley floor to rent bikes. I was tired of walking but thought a nice bike ride would give us a chance to explore a little more. It was a great way to end the afternoon. 

After the ride, we went back to our campsite, grilled up some brats, sat by the fire, and called it a night. The next morning was Monday so we packed up and drove back down to SD, arriving by dinnertime. 

It was a packed weekend but we were definitely glad we went. Luckily, my pregnancy symptoms didn't get in the way too much and we were able to enjoy ourselves, even though we couldn't backpack or go on really long or challenging hikes. AND, the park was surprisingly not that crowded thanks to the hantavirus breakout in one of the cabins that led to a 40% decrease in traffic. We were a little worried about exposure but we were staying in a completely different part of the park and it seemed like it was safe. Although I did see a little deer mouse one night and I totally freaked out...

Up next - Marc and Nicole's visit and Franzi goes back to Germany :(

Have a great week!