My husband Jim’s birthday is November 12, and this year he turned 70. He likes to celebrate his “big” birthdays in Yosemite, so he made reservations for the weekend of November 15 – 17 at the Ahwahnee Hotel. We drove over on Friday the 15th, leaving early enough (we hoped) to make a 6 PM dinner reservation in the Ahwahnee dining room.
The drive across the Central Valley was gorgeous and the traffic wasn’t too bad. Due to the weather predictions, we headed for route 140, which would take us into Yosemite alongside the outflowing Merced River. The other main route looked like there might be snow, the road runs higher and Jim didn’t want to risk having to put on chains. The day was sunny with lots of huge white cumulus clouds, moving into one formation after another, gorgeous – but every time we looked east we saw a ceiling of clouds over the Sierras which got blacker and blacker the closer we came. The weather caught up with us a little west of Mariposa. Driving along, we were suddenly in a massive rainstorm, we had to turn the windshield wipers all the way up and the view still wasn’t clear! Also, the windshield had little circles on it – not quite big enough for hail, but possibly ice pellets. The temperature shown by the car dropped from 50 to 31 in minutes. The whole thing only lasted about 10 minutes, but we got rain (less hard) off and on the rest of the way into the valley, and the mountains we drove through from then on were off and on covered in fog.
We arrived at the Ahwahnee around 4:15, so dinner was no problem. They put us in a room on the 5th floor with an external balcony (after carrying all our stuff up for us!). I didn’t take a photo of the balcony, but Jim did; here’s what we had.
Of course, the balcony door was also the only window in the room. The fact that you can’t see anything but the balcony (you should be able to see Half Dome) is a sample of how foggy it was; it was actually taken about 9:30 AM on Monday. Yosemite was there when the fog cleared; here’s Glacier Point from the balcony, about 5:30 PM Friday:
We made our dinner appointment Friday night. Here’s the Ahwahnee dining room, taken with my Samsung cellphone, which is amazing at low-light photos:
At some time point Friday evening I realized that November 15 still had the Supermoon, the last one this year. I took my cellphone out on the balcony and got a couple of amazing photos. This is the supermoon and Half Dome, taken at 9 PM:
And here, taken about the same time, are Glacier Point and Sentinel Dome, lighted only by the supermoon. You can see all the lights on in the hotel, in the lower part of the photo.
My biggest problem with our room was the size of the bed pillows, which were much too large. I sleep with a standard pillow between my steel-implanted knees, and I just couldn’t get comfortable with that huge pillow. Fortunately, the front desk was happy to ask Housekeeping to give me a standard size pillow and I slept much better the rest of our stay.
I’ll talk more about the trip in another post. If you’re interested in all the photos I took, you can find them at https://hedera.smugmug.com/Travel/Yosemite-2024. And you might be interested in Jim’s photos (he took many more than I did), at https://jtringl.smugmug.com/Browser/2024/Ahwahnee-2024.
