13th June, Friday – San Francisco, Yosemite

Day 14
Woke up a little later since we had pretty much seen the key attractions of SF over the past 2 days already..

Breakfast, checked out, and spent the morning walking around Union Square, doing a spot of shopping for gifts and other food necessities – Yosemite probably isn’t gonna have like Subways and cheap food, yeah? So improvised with buying some cup noodles, biscuits, bread and peanut butter..

Headed back to the USAHostel around 11am to grab our bags and catch the tram to Pier 39 to transfer to our bus / train transfer to Yosemite… Was starting to get worried when Sirui didn’t appear 10 minutes after the arranged meeting time, so gave him a buzz.. Hhmmm, apparently he lost his way, and was making his way back.. O_O After a flurry of frantic directions delivered over the phone, and rushing over to the tram station, we discovered to our chagrin that we weren’t gonna make it to the bus at the rate the tram was travelling!

So we hopped onto a cab to try to make the bus transfer.. Boy, those must be one of the more harrowing moments of this trip – we have multiple transfers along our trip, but there’s usually not much of a backup plan cos the bus timings here aren’t as frequent as back home, so usually if you missed 1 connection, it snowballs and you’d miss the next few. In this case, if we missed the bus, and hence the train to Merced, we would miss our Yarts Shuttle Bus to Yosemite Park and our hostel. O_O

But thank God! Wah. The power of prayer.. He has certainly helped me through so many legs of this journey! We barely caught the bus – the bus driver saw us and stopped; and so we managed to get on the bus to Emeryville to catch our Amtrak train to Merced before our transfer to the Yarts bus to Yosemite. Phew.

Enroute to Emeryville, we crossed the Bay Bridge, and had a view of SF.. Wow.


You could see this wall of fog that literally obscured part of SF – the Golden Gate Bridge was not visible, and even AlCatraz was shrouded partially.. Just glad that we had such good weather during the first day we were in SF to take photos and explore SF..

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Upon reaching Merced, it was a 1 hour ride to our hostel – the Yosemite Bug Hostel, which lay another 1 hour ride outside of Yosemite National Park (the accommodations in Yosemite Park itself is really quite expensive.. -_-“)

We had booked tent cabins for our first night, since we thought it had sounded vaguely “romantic”.. haha.. but found that it was, well, a tent cabin, with a tent, 2 beds, a light, and 1 power socket. Kinda like our accommodations back in Venice during my Europe trip in year 1, where WongYi and I were in a tent together.. And yes, it was equally cold in the mornings!

Since we had reached early and the sun had yet to set, we decided to hike up the hostel’s Bug Trail.. Pretty steep inclines up the hillside, but with beautiful views of the surrounding Midpines landscape..





The trail led to a small pool of sorts, “Hornets Nest Pool” – don’t ask me why its called that, but I’m just glad that there were no hornets in sight!



Hohoho.. the water was a bit cold for me, and the thoughts of N. fowleri parasite(from M2 MicroB) that swims up the nostrils of people who swims in quarries, and is incurable, kinda scared me off from entering the water.. O_O

Made it back to the hostel for dinner of cup noodles and Ritz with peanut butter before retiring for the night..