At the end of May, I put out a call to my friends asking about cheap vacation rentals. M-, who we had met through our agencies trainings hooked us up with two people that were willing to loan us their vacation houses(!). So last week, we spent up in Groveland with the dogs on retreat. Here is a play by play..

Day 1: We left town in the late morning, stopping by Peets for some Fair Trade ground coffee. At a roadside produce stand in Manteca, we bought Doradita’s potato chips from El Monte, CA, locally grown nuts, blueberries and cherries along with some other treats.

We arrived at the house, which we expected to be a tract townhome, since we looked at a map and saw that it a huge complex. When we arrived, we were pleasantly surprised. Even though the place is a gated community (and huge) there were obvious differences between the places and a huge amount of space between each one. Plus, there are many vacant lots, which adds to the effect of open space. About 20 minutes after we arrived, we noticed a baby deer about 5 feet away from the garage.

We decided to go to dinner and the grocery store that night. Dinner was at the Iron Door Saloon, the oldest bar in California. I discovered before the trip that it was actually owned by the family of a friend, who happened to be working the night that we went.

But first, we arrived around 4pm and dinner wasn’t to start until 5. We had already spent a few minutes looking around the tiny town. Not being shoppers, there wasn’t much to entice us. It was time for some geocaching! I had thought that I had seen a cache in town when I was researching, but maybe it had been archived. We headed East, toward Yosemite and started grabbing one by one, as long as they were close to Hwy 120. We visited a Hanging Tree, which apparently had killed many folks back in the gold rush days. We grabbed a couple of others when I saw that we were near one called Spelunkelite, with a terrain difficulty of 4. Well, I was wearing a dress and clogs to go out to dinner and have been having back problems, so I knew it was a sketchy proposition, but still couldn’t resist a cave. There were many warnings in the cache description about having 2 flashlights and having to crouch and being very careful. It also had a nudge in the cache description to the area that the cache was. Unfortunately, it also suggested the number of steps required to get the cache. When we arrived at the described area, we hadn’t really had to crouch, didn’t really need a light and had taken less than half of the steps that the cache page recommended. So, we thought we had to keep going in order to find it. J- started to, but decided he was not up for doing it alone. This part DID involve crouching and one light per person (when we only had one). I went instead. When I got to the recommended number of steps, I started looking to no avail, so I went about 20 steps further, found nothing and looked all the way back. I was still looking when I arrived at Jeff and found it about 10 feet from where he had been sitting. I had made the mistake of carrying my purse over my shoulder and my hat in my hand. I had dropped my hat at some point and my purse (which wasn’t in great shape before) was a little wet and covered in cave dust. My hands were VERY dirty.

So, back at the restaurant at 6 we washed up and the menu looked great. We kept it simple with fish and chips, salad and water. The fish and chips were well done with a light beer-type batter. We had been disappointed recently when going to a new shi-shi southern restaurant in Oakland with the breading, so we were relieved to like this.

The next day, we invented a new term: “Bourdain-worthy”. We have read several of Anthony Bourdain books and also enjoyed several of his TV shows. His taste are not necessarily hoity-toity, although one of the things he enjoys is when a chef devotes particular attention the his dishes that makes them perfect. We were in Sonora and stopped at the Blackthorn Grill, which focuses on local and sustainably grown food. One of the dishes that we ordered was the special: Grilled Citrus and Cilantro half game hen salad. Definitely Bourdain-worthy. This piece of meat was cooked so absolutely perfectly. The skin was crispy, salty and a little sour. It was served on a bed of arugula and we couldn’t imagine that piece of meat being seasoned, cooked or serve any better.

Later in the trip, we went to Rainbow Pools. A client had told me about this place and it is such a find. It is a day use area maintained by the National Forest Service and is mostly a place for locals, there is no sign or anything. It is a wonderful spot off the Tuolumne that has a swimming hole and cliff jumping. When we were there, a summer camp was there and it was people-watching at its finest.

On our last day, we went to visit the spectacular Yosemite Valley. We ate at The Grill in Yosemite Village. The meal was not great, but it could have been worse. The did offer a veggie burger (although I can’t recommend it) and they served sweet potato fries instead of french fries, which was a nice touch.

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