It's with a sad heart I share with you that our itinerary has been impacted in a very significant way. As you probably know, on midnight October 1, 2013 the federal government shut down. What this means for us is that all federal property (which includes national parks) have been closed to visitors. We had a camping reservation which was set to begin in Yosemite national park today, however I just learned that all reservations have been canceled and refunded, including ours.
Several weeks ago we contemplated the idea that the Yosemite Rim Fire would divert us away from Yosemite. Unfortunately we forgot to factor in the fact that our federal government is incredibly dysfunctional. Thus, it's not a natural event like wildfire that we need to be worried about, it's human blundering by our elected politicians.
Stay tuned to the blog for more promised updates. There should be some time to work on them because we are staying in San Francisco one more night and will leave tomorrow morning, a day later than planned in our itinerary.
You can thank Ted Cruz and the Tea Party idiots for ruining your Yosemite trip. Unbelievable. I am sorry to hear this. You guys are truly victims of the dysfunction in Washington, D.C. I could go on and on with a political rant but I digress. Despite the self-absorbed megalomaniacs in D.C., you guys should continue to have fun on your trip.
ReplyDeleteThanks for thinking of us. Both girls wrote long letters to our congressmen to express their unhappiness, and Grace signed her's "disgusted 9 year old," which was pretty excellent in my book. I hate to say it, but this has kind of knocked the wind out of our sails a bit, and we're contemplating turning east and heading home. We shall see. There's still a lot of ground to cover and a lot to see.
ReplyDeleteSo sorry to hear you can't make it to Yosemite and that the girls are getting this unfortunate lesson in how the government works (or fails to). I've been enjoying seeing pictures and learning about parts of the country that I haven't been too yet. However, there are worse places to be stuck in than San Francisco, so I hope you can make the best of it.
ReplyDeleteThanks Mike. We are disappointed but at least our paycheck is not on the line. We keep thinking about the rangers we've met and the campgrounds we've been in as being out of work and deserted. I bet the animals that live there are far happier without all the humans (or they should be anyway).
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