Mr. P was completely overwhelmed by the trees. They made him feel completely insignificant. Not a very nice feeling, in Mr. P’s oppinion.

Even the pinecones made fun of him. This was not a good day for our beloved Mr. P.

12/6: So we had reached the last destination on our roadtrip. Yosemite National Park. And really, there isn’t much to say. The pictures can barely give you a feeling of the magnificense of this natural wonder. But never the less, I will try to show you.

As the geography nerd I am, this sight made sentences about ice ages and glaciers and fjords and million year extrogen processes flow out of me. I couldn’t control it. Hanna listened patiently while she enjoyed the magnificent view. To appreciate beauty, there’s rarely any need for explanations and analyses. Hanna knew that, but I just couldn’t help myself.

You see, Yosemite Valley is like a fjord but without the ocean. Oh, it was breathtaking.

We also went to Mariposa Grove, which was supposed to be the most easily accessible grove with huge sequoias. Tht turned out to be true, but what we weren’t told was that the number of tourists on these trails outnumbered the number of sequoias in the grove.

It was crazy, the amount of people that were there. And the heat was suffocating.

So, to try to get rid of the crouds, we decided to take a longer trail up to the upper grove.

Mariposa means butterfly in Spanish. At first, I found it pretty strange. Why would they name a sequoia grove after an insect? But right here, by the flowering bushes on the more open slopes of the upper grove, I understood why. There were butterflies everywhere! Yellow and orange, fluttering around the white flowers. It was beautiful.

Odd flower that grew next to the giant sequoias. Dinosaur flower, prehistoric remnant, I would say. Just like the trees.

The lovers.

And the forest was full of squirrels and ravens. They are incredibly beautiful birds, ravens.

The upper grove trail turned out to be a perfect, shaded and tranquil forest walk. We didn’t meet a single person. Almost all the tourists didn’t stray far from the parkinglot.

Yes, Yosemite was a beautiful place. But going there in June, in the beginning of the high season, might not be the best choice. Both due to the heat and the crowds.

11/6: The map is misleading when it comes to the last stretch of the 49 before it reaches the turnoff toward Yosemite. On the map, the road looks pretty straight and easy. But as the geographer I’m supposed to be, I should have known not to trust the map so fully. I’ve had entire courses about how mapmakers simplify and modify and categorize in order to make the maps more readable. Rarely are maps an exact representation of reality. That is what happened when Hanna and I were driving the last stretch before reaching Yosemite.

After leaving Calaveras Big Trees Park, the road started off ass pretty comfortable and really beautiful, with the mountains coloured in shining gold in the sunset. We drove past deep blue lakes and tiny mountain villages.

But then the road started climbing up the mountains, became narrower and narrower and curvier and curvier. And at the same time, the sun dissappeared behind the mountains. I was the one driving and kept my eyes concentrated on the reflex lines in the middle of the roads – but Hanna, who could see the mountain slope dissappear into the darkneess below us, sat whimpering slightly and holding on to her seat.

But god, did I love our Toyota Camry right about then. We met cars that were struggling with screaming motors up the mountain slope. Our Camry seemed to barely have to work.

The drive felt like it took hours and at one point we were seriously afraid that we would have to sleep in the car by the road, because it never seemed to stop winding up and down the slopes.

Well, in the end it all turned out fine. We reached crossroads and turned off the 49 towards Yosemite, and ten minutes before last check-in time we reached our hostel. We were safe.

That certainly was a slightly too adventurous journey to be enjoyable. But I made it, with some extra self-confidence in my own driving as a result.

11/6: The guidebook said that if we did a slight detour from the 49, we would arrive in Calveras Big Trees State Park. And there, along an easily hiked trail, we would see some of the largest trees in the world. Well, as the tree lover I am (and seeing as I was the one driving this afternoon), I decided that we just had to go there.

And seriously. I don’t know what to say. They are so big that it’s impossible to take pictures of them.

With any perspective you use, some part of the tree gets cut off and they just. Don’t fit.

It was a very nice evening walk, though, among these giants and the squirrels. We were more or less the only ones still left in the park hiking, which made walking among the sequoias feel  even more bizarre.

Beatiful trees. Scary. The giant sequoia is the one spieces in existance today that can reach the largest biomass of any organism on Earth. I believe that.

11/6: Highway 49 is the highway that goes north to south along the Californian feet of the Sierra Nevadas. Mostly, it is a narrow road that crawls up and down the slopes and to drive there, you really need to concentrate in order to not just drive off the mountainside.

The landscape along the highway looks very special too, with the yellow grass and the oaks sticking up everywhere. And the cows, enjoying the grass and shade of the trees.

As you know, I like traffic signs. This one, warning about lumber trucks, I found utterly charming.

In Amador County, we left the 49 for a short detour and found a charming little vinyard by the road.

The garden was full of odd art, and in the cool darkness of the tasting room, we were offered tastes of all their eight or so wines, free of charge. I felt kind of stupid, though, sipping the different red wines and trying to say appreciative and correct things to the winemaker. I know nothing about wine, and could barely taste the difference between the different kinds. But I think my dad would have loved it. They charged far more than what we could afford for one of their wine bottles, so I guess it was good wine too. I just wouldn’t know.

But they are beautiful places, vineyards.

The highway was named 49 after the 49ers, that is, the fortune seekers that rushed here in 1849 during the beginning of the gold rush. And sure enough, it goes through most of the tiny old towns that were lavishly built with gold money. Now, they mostly seem to exist for the few the tourists that drive through. Like Amador City, with the American flags.

Or Sutter Creek, with the beautiful balconies.

They were all really pretty, these small gold rush towns, but they all looked kind of the same. So, after a couple main streets with these wild west false fronts, we didn’t even bother to stop. We just drove straight through.

In Placerville, Hanna and I decided to do the only respectable thing you can do if you happen to find yourself in need of breakfast in the United States of America. We went to a diner and ordered the breakfast special.

And really, I was in heaven. Normally I don’t like breakfast, back in my grade school days my dad fought a constant battle against my bad morning appetite, trying to get me to eat something. I simply don’t like what people normally eat for breakfast. I’d much rather eat dinner leftovers from the day before than cereal or a sandwich.

So, the eggs and bacon and potatoes and pancakes were perfect for me! I loved our diner breakfast, and so did Hanna.

Funny sidenote – as we were sitting eating breakfast, I noticed that they were showing soccer on the to big flatscreen TVs in the diner. After a closer look, I realised it was the European Championship game between Sweden and Ukraine. We saw Zlatan make one goal, and then the Ukrainians follow up with two. Then we had to leave. And that was my extent of this year’s soccer event. I hear Sweden was crap though, and that it rained all through June. I’m not sorry I missed it.

11/6: We ended up sleeping at a cosy little motel in Placerville instead. And when we woke up on Monday morning, we realised that we couldn’t have ended up in a better place in this old gold country. Because Placervill has all the aesthetics of an old gold town, with the wild west movie set fronts on the houses and the mountains in the backyard, but unlike Nevada City, it actually felt lived in. It wasn’t as clean and pretty, the edges was slightly jagged and there were actual residents walking on the streets, and barely no tourists at all. No, we liked Placerville alot, Hanna and I.

Our motel in the strong, already hot Sierra Nevada sun.

Placerville has a quite strange nickname. It’s Hangtown, due to the couple of men that were hanged here back in the golddigging days. Not a thing I would be proud of, but they seem to like that part of their past in Placerville. ‘Don’t mess with the people of Placerville, because they are hardcore.’

The main street Main st. (and also more or less the only street) in Placerville.

The oldest continuously operating hardware store west of the Mississippi lies on Main Street in Placerville.

Yeah, Placerville was cute and layed back. Certainly worth a visit along the 49.

Back in real time, today, Wednesday the eleventh of July 2012, I finally finished “Anna Karenina” by Leo Tolstoy. It’s been a long journey, both physically, mentally and timewise. I started reading it one morning in Frida’s dorm room in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada in the beginning of March. Now I’m in Sebastopol, Sonoma County, California and it’s July. Four months. That might be the longest time it has taken me to finish a book. And certainly the longest distance traveled on land. I have no idea about the kilometers, but for all of you who know Köppen, I’ve traveled all the way from a cold temperate climate zone to a hot and dry Mediterranean climate zone with Anna and Vronsky and Levin and Kitty in my mind. And if you don’t happen to speak Köppen, I can just tell you, you would be impressed.

It really is a good book too. A great book. Tolstoy has such extraordinary finesse and precision in his writing, that you feel like you know the characters already after the first introductory sentence. And the way he makes you feel for them, even though you might not like them. The couple of chapters that describe the birth of a firstborn child from the father’s perspective might be the best piece of prose I have ever read. He is a master, and the novel is a masterpiece. There’s just nothing else to say about it.

But lying there in the dry grass by the pond, after my post-weeding swim, with the afternoon breeze starting to build up in the wild plum trees on the hill, I felt such relief. Reading the last sentence and putting the book down, it felt like I could suddenly breathe freely again. It had been Such a Long Book.

Later, after lunch, when I was preparing to go back down to the pond and realised that I now, for the first time in four months, got to do one of the most exciting things I know, namely, start reading a new book, the feeling of relief was enriched by a bubbly happiness and anticipation. I felt like I had the entire world at my fingertips. It was one of those rare moments of pure happiness.

Of course, I couldn’t control myself. I ended up taking two books with me to the pond: the Neil Gaiman short story collection that I got from Natalia, and the little book about buddhist meditation that I got from aunt Kaarina just before leaving Stockholm. They started beautifully, both of them. I feel like a completely different person.

10/6: It was in Coloma in 1848 that the first Californian gold was found. Today, they have made the place into a strange kind of amusment park. Luckily, we drove through after closing time. We just got a shot each of the old Trading Post, and then we continued on our way toward a reasonably priced motel along the 49.

10/6: The guidebook said that Nevada City was a pretty little town, built by newly rich golddiggers back during the gold rush in the middle of the 1800s. So, even though it was slightly out of our way, we thought it could be worth a visit. Maybe we could even find a good motel there and stay the night.

Well, boy, were we wrong. Sure, it was pretty, looked like something from an old western movie. But really, it didn’t feel real! The place was just full of tourists and all the motels were super expensive. After just an hours walk up and down the main street, we decided that we didn’t want to stay for a minute longer, got into our car and started driving south on the 49.