Post 12 San Francisco and Yosemite

- October 25, 2025

Oct 12-19

It was a beautiful week in Napa Valley. The weather was perfect, but, on to San Francisco.

There was rain predicted for Monday, so we left Napa early Sunday morning to spend some time in the city before we arrived at our next accommodations. We made our way to the Castro, San Francisco’s gay neighborhood, for an afternoon of LGBTQ history and sensory overload. The streets are full of rainbow flags, ethnic foods scents and oh… then there’s the naked men. It was Sunday and the boys were out strutting their stuff… drag, leather or nothing at all. Lots of pups with their humans.

We took a self-guided walking tour. First stop, the GLBT Historical Society Museum. The museum is small but covers gay history and the gay rights movement.

Next stop, the Castro Theater then on to Harvey Milk’s camera shop. Harvey Milk moved to the Castro in 1973 and opened a camera shop which operated as a center for his political involvement as a gay activist. This pretty much solidified the Castro’s identity. He was the first openly gay politician elected to office in California, serving as a city supervisor. After only a year in office, both he and the mayor were assassinated at city hall by a former city supervisor who disagreed with their views on a gay rights ordinance.

We ended our Castro adventure at the local brew pub, Copper.

Back a few weeks ago, when we were on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington, we were having breakfast at a table overlooking the water. A woman named Michelle sat at the next table with her coffee and we struck up a conversation. She was from Pacifica, CA just south of San Francisco. We asked her for recommendations for sightseeing and accommodations. By the end of the conversation, she invited us to camp at Shelldance Gardens, an orchid nursery, where she lives with her friend and owner of Shelldance, Nancy. Shelldance grows orchids and bromeliads in several greenhouses located on a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean. We toured the greenhouses and spent an evening chatting with these two wonderful women. The orchids were beautiful, but the bromeliads…Amazing!!

As predicted, Monday was a rainy day…the first rain of the season. Everyone was preparing like we do in Massachusetts for our first snowfall. We were warned to be careful driving because everyone forgets how to drive in the rain!

Tuesday the sun returned and we ventured back into San Francisco. We challenged ourselves to get there by public transportation and we’re happy to report that we got in and out without getting lost.

We checked off all the tourist spots:

Dragon Gate/Chinatown

Cable Car Ride/Museum

Lombard Street

Fisherman’s Wharf, Ghirardelli Square, Goldengate Bridge- our pictures from these sites somehow got deleted from our phone, but this is what we saw.

It was a full day of fun!

We said our Goodbyes to Nancy and Michelle. We were blessed to connect with these two gems. Our next stop was Yosemite National Park.

Traveling from San Francisco to Yosemite, we crossed the San Joaquin Valley, a huge agricultural area. Each part of the valley has its own distinct crops; almonds, pistachios, avocadoes, grapes, garlic, oranges. We happened to be crossing through the avocado and garlic area where you can get 15 avocadoes for $1 or, if you’re brave enough, try some garlic ice cream! We agree that the garlic ice cream was really good.😋

We camped just outside the entrance to Yosemite. We were happy to find that the park was open and being maintained (clean bathrooms and no overflowing trash). The visitor centers were staffed with both rangers and local volunteers pitching in where needed. We spent one full day in Yosemite Valley where most of the big attractions are located. We watched climbers on El Capitan. Some near the top are only visible through binoculars.

The stunning Yosemite Falls had pretty much gone dry, as it usually does by this time every year, but we were lucky that there was a major rainfall and flooding a few days before we were there so the falls were running again.

We did a couple of short hikes that took us to the Yosemite Cemetery and the Ansel Adams Gallery. The cemetery is surprisingly big. It’s hard to remember that people were living here before it was a national park and many of them are buried in the cemetery. Most of the graves are from the mid to late 1800s.

The next day we visited the southern end of the park to hike through the Mariposa Grove of Sequoias. The 1.7 mile loop trail led to many dispersed Sequoias with some having names like The Bachelor and 3 Maidens, The Sentinals, The Tunnel Tree and the oldest sequoia in Yosemite, named Grizzly Giant, is in this grove. Grizzly Giant is estimated to be about 2900 years old. There was still snow on the ground from the recent monsoon that dropped rain on the coast and snow in the mountains.

Since we arrived in the western part of the country, we’ve been entertained by the ravens. They are really cool birds that have little fear of humans. They’re curious and often come close for a look at what you’re doing. They spend a lot of time squabbling with each other.