Yosemite

I've been a nomad for most of August, and will be again for much of September, as I'm heading back up to Toronto for a couple of weeks of intense work and hopefully some most excellent showbiz spots.

But while my September travels will be purely in the name of work and sleep deprivation, this month was all about fun. As well as my trip back to England to see beautiful new babies and watch lovely friends get hitched, I did a little California exploring.

A huge chunk of my holiday allowance gets used up on my visits home, but since I've been living here I've tried to make as many little jaunts as possible - to Vegas and the Hoover Dam, to Palm Springs, to San Diego and Santa Barbara - well, you get the picture.

My parents came out to see me at the end of July, and I managed to scrape together enough days off to head north to Yosemite with them. (Incidentally, my mother is the worst back-seat driver known to mankind. I was tempted to leave her in the crazy Swedish town where we stopped to eat smoked salmon open sandwiches a la Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. She loved that town so much I think it probably would have taken a couple of days of cooing over the giant Swedish crackers and the jars of pickled fish before she even noticed I'd gone.)

But yeah. I digress. Yosemite.

We saw A Bear.

In a Tree.

A BEAR IN A TREE.

A black bear, to be precise. In an apple tree. I would regale you with pictures right now, but sadly my camera doesn't have a zoom lense just yet, and my pictures are basically of a big tree, quite far away, with a brown blob in it.

So instead, I shall regale you with facts.

Did you know that:

 - Black bears can actually be any colour from dark brown/black through to blonde?

 - They have a sense of smell multiple times better than that of a bloodhound?

 - They're really freaking good at climbing trees?

We also hired bikes to expore Yosemite Valley.

We all enjoyed that. Some of us more so than others.

 I have about a thousand more pictures I could share - Yosemite is absolutely stunning. We saw amazing wildlife (rattlesnake eating a mouse, anyone?), incredible rock formations and what would, in any other season, be mightily impressive waterfalls.

We swam in the river, hung out with some stoned Dutch dudes (my parents really clicked with them, it was both surreal and hilarious), visited some extremely large trees, and basically had a rather nice few days.