So, here we are in beautiful downtown Fresno, a city we’ve driven past dozens of times over the years but never stopped. I actually don’t know anyone who ever stopped here on purpose. This time, however, we have a motive. For us it’s the gateway to Yosemite National Park on our trip home from Palm Springs. Yes, we could have stretched our day a little further and driven closer to the park, but Fresno was our choice mainly to because of the difference in price for rooms as one gets closer to the park.

Getting here was about a 5 hour drive which is about the extreme limit of how far we like to travel on any given day. We could have gone further today, however, because Diane let me drive for almost a couple of hours. OK, I drove about 1.5 hours. Technically, that’s almost a couple of hours when you round up.

Tomorrow morning we’ll be driving a couple of hours in to the park for the day. Once we’ve seen what can be seen in 5 or 6 hours we’ll drive out to Modesto to spend tomorrow night.

I took a bunch of photos on the drive up, mostly of highway signs to document where we were, so they aren’t very scenic. Just lots of lanes of cement traffic lanes on Highway 99 and I-5 and many other lesser important tributaries of those magnificent roads. Since I took them, I’ll show a couple of them.

Regarding that last photo, it’s just more evidence that people who live in LA, and the surrounding area, don’t breath anything they can’t see. Once we got over the first hill the air cleared right up.

Makes Fresno look fantastic!