Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember and remember more than I have seen.

Not my quote! read it somwhere, but sure felt like it!

As I was peeking into various cook blogs ... I noticed that many contained a lot more than recipes. Bit of history and heritage, travel destnations with interesting postcards /pictures taken..that set me off.. I have always liked going off to some tourist attraction (well, who doesn't?)
At the start of summer, M and I went on a week end trip to Yosemite and Sequoia National park.
Yosemite Park is a treat for the eyes!All that u see around u is trees, mountains and some SNOW! Can u beat that?!?! Snow in the middle of hot summer!!(we were lucky to go when we did, a couple of weeks later the heat intensified and there was no snow covering the ground) In winter the snow completely covers the ground and slowly melts, yet there are spots where it has not melted and still lies in a heap! It was an unusual sight… to see snow in the middle of a hot day! It was even more fun to play in !

The water falls are another story all together! Huge amount of water… gushing forth, sparkling clean and ice cold! It was real fun standing on some nearby rocks and getting splashed by the water plummeting from the water fall !

The GIANT Seqoias are AWESOME.. HUGE.... my pics do not do them justice at all. One cannot really capture their grandeur in a postcard size piece of paper!

Then we went to the famous Boyden caves.. these caves were discovered by a man named Boyden who spent years in the caves, studying them. I was very very excited to see these caves. The climb upto the caves was extremely steep, (huffin' n puffin')but in the end it was worth it! The caves have calcites, these have been forming for hundreds and thousands of years! Outside it was a warm sunny, I may as well say hot day, but inside the caves it was real chill ! the temp. dropped to less than 50 deg. F ! it is completely dark, but for the visitors to see, they have put up lights in many places and also bars to hold on to and walk, not just for the safety of the visitors but more importantly for the stalagmites and stalactites, which when touched may stop forming.
I have always wanted to see stalagmites and stalactites! Ever since I have been a school kid! I was so absolutely thrilled….. the tour guide told us that the stalagmites and stalactites were very old, and we can judge how old they are… it takes 100 years for them to grow 1 inch!! The ones we saw were maybe a footlong and some even longer than that!! The stalagmites and stalactites have water drops glistening on them, these when combined with limestone air… etc. form a deposit slowly … oh, very slowly. I always had an easy way to remember stalagmites and stalactites : stalagmites are the ones that grow from the floor and reach out so they might reach the ceiling, and stalactites are the ones who hold on tight to the ceiling in the fear that they might fall ! get it?!

We went to see the oldest living thing in the world…… guess what? A tree! It is called the General Sherman tree. It is said that the tree is ancient, can u guess the age? 110-200-300-400 years old….? No, well let me tell you , it is around 2500- 2700 years old!! It is HUGE and the best part of the tree is that it is still alive and growing!! It was awesome!! No pic of this.... seeing is believing!

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