When we started this trip, we bought an AT&T sim card in Florida that had a monthly contract allowing us to have unlimited calls, texts and 1GB of data. It has been great in helping us with organsing the trip, doing Wikipedia searches and keeping in contact with people and the news but there are so many areas of the US that do not have any cell coverage and we seem to be hitting most of them in this trip.
Whilst we were visiting Sequoia and Kings Canyon, we had no phone signal at all. It was actually really good being completely off the grid but also frustrating as we couldn't find out what was happening in Yosemite. Just before we lost signal, we saw that the fire in Yosemite was getting bigger and the whole valley had been closed but it was due to reopen the day we were arriving. With no way of keeping up to date on what was going on with the fire, we had to block it out of our minds and enjoy the time we had in Sequoia and Kings Canyon.
The day we left Sequoia and Kings Canyon, I was watching the phone for the whole journey until finally, we had signal. With the signal came the email we had been dreading "Your reservation in Yosemite National Park has been cancelled due to fire". Pants!!
The evacuation of Yosemite Valley had been extended as the fire was still out of control, there was no electricity and air quality was at a dangerous level.
Maybe it was a good thing. We love Yosemite, it is our favourite National Park and we would have been disappointed had we arrived to air quality that was too poor to hike in and views that were ruined by the smoke.
Although we now had some phone signal and a little data, it was too unrealiable to do any replanning so we stopped off at the first Starbucks we could find for the free internet.
Yosemite has a lot of accommodation options, hotels, motels, campsites and even pre-pitched tents so we knew there were going to be a thousands of people in our position who were trying to find somewhere else to stay. We didn't want to go to the same places they were going to, we wanted somewhere away from the crowds so we looked further afield.
I came up with the idea of Napa Valley. We've visited Napa Valley a few times before, twice staying in the town of Napa and twice visiting from San Francisco on a Wine Tour and had a really good time. We wanted to try to go somewhere different so I found the town of Calistoga on the Northern tip of the Napa Valley. We hadn't been to the north before, it was far enough away from Yosemite that we wouldn't be fighting for accommodation with the crowds and there looked like there was plenty to do and see around the town. We looked at the accommodation in the town and we found a B&B with good TripAdvisor reviews so I called up and booked a room. Little did we know then how awesome this B&B would be and what a good town we had chosen but more on that in the next blog entry.
Shame that your plans were scuppered and I'd have loved to have see Yosemite, never having been there myself but this is 90+ days in without any real disruption to your plans so pretty good going!!
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