One of the places we visited on our summer vacation was Devil’s Postpile National Monument. This was really a special beautiful place. It is marked by this formation of columnar basalt, but it is a beautiful place in the mountains as you can see here.

We arrived at Mammoth Lakes on Sunday and made plans to visit Yosemite on Tuesday. The concierge thought it would be a good time to visit since it was midweek and public schools are back in session.

It was a beautiful drive to the park, but once we got down in Yosemite valley there was quite a bit of smoke, so much that I only took one photo down there, with my iPhone, of the falls.

kc and John Michael were going to go off on a bike ride that the rangers assured them was well mapped and fun. That’s when I discovered my kneel-scooter had a flat tire. Oh, did I mention it was hot and humid? So, as the crowds began to grow to Disney-like proportions, I insisted kc and John Michael take-off and I pushed to scooter to a bike rental location, certain they would have a mechanic and supplies – nope. There were two college kids who never worked on a bike, but who would sell me a patch kit and let me use tools in a cardboard box. Long story, shortened, I fixed the tire and injured my foot, perhaps in a new way.

I tried to intercept kc and John Michael what was supposed to be the return path, but after a few hours gave up and went back to the truck. They got back an hour later and said they had gotten lost, the signage was non-existent and ended up having ridden about 15 miles.

We tried to see a few more things in the valley until we were so irritated with it all that we headed-out. The eastern and high regions of the park were much less crowded, cooler and less smoky and we stopped along the way to relax and have a bit of fun.

We had planned a camping and mountain bike trip for this week. The state of my foot prevented both, so we rented a Ford Expedition and some hotel rooms and headed north, up highway 395.

On the first day, we stopped at Ridgecrest where we visited a local museum (bell ringing), stayed at a decent hotel with a great pool for John Michael, then proceeded north the following day.

That morning we stopped at the Fossil Falls, a volcanic area dotted with cinder cones and notable for this ancient and long-ago dried falls. It was quite beautiful, but by midday the temperature was already hitting 100F.

A bit further north we stopped at the Manzanar relocation camp where, after the Pearl Harbor attack, many American citizens of Japanese heritage were, essentially, imprisoned. This site has been very well restored and gives one a sense of the huge injustice of this action.