An early Christmas!

Santa came early this year and in a joint birthday and Christmas celebration we spent the day at Disneyland – the original!

Future Jedi’s were trained at the Star Wars academy, future nightmares were made at Ghoul Galaxy Space Mountain, future blisters were made over the many many kilometres walked, and the smiles just didn’t come off their faces! Even Nanny and Poppa thoroughly enjoyed the day. Poppa seemed quite happy to be ‘obliged’ to stay behind at the scarier height-limitation rides to look after Olivia….

We said a teary farewell to Nanny and Poppa who are flying home to New Zealand after spending the last 6 weeks with us (the fridge is now fixed thanks to a delivery from France via Aurélie, but we’ll miss Nanny and Poppa’s Nespresso machine!) and we started North towards Yosemite. After two days with an old school friend Kat and her daughter Nina in Northern LA, we arrived in Yosemite, our last North American National Park to visit. The kids have completed another ‘Junior Ranger Program’ and are now the proud holders of 10 Junior Ranger badges!

Yosemite is grandiose, on the same scale as Yellowstone, but full of people and works! It took us a full afternoon of driving around in circles to understand how the roads in the Valley worked, but at least we got to see the magnificent granite formations from all angles… El Capitan with the climbers on their 4-day ascension is amazing, and how they manage to hang up there for so long beats comprehension.

Unlike the visit to the first national park that saw us walking 45 miles in 3 days and Pippa putting her back out, we’re taking this one a lot slower and enjoying some time to sort through the camper, spend some time on school and enjoy the campfire. We’ve been saddened to see the effects of California’s drought on Yosemite’s forests where 1 in 5 pines are browning or dead and without some serious rainfall in the coming winters the pine forests may disappear.