The Most Intense Travel Booking Yet

Wow.

You may picked up on this from our previous trips, but we really like national parks. One in particular that has been on our list is Yosemite! I really wanted to do the Half Dome hike there ever since I learned about it and we decided to go for it Labor Day weekend this year. Sounds easy, but just wait.

First of all, EVERYONE wants to hike Half Dome. Because of the intensity and technical parts of it, the park can’t have a million people trying to do it all at once. So in order to get a permit to hike it, you have to enter a lottery. That’s right, you can’t just show up at the park and go hunting, you have to plan months ahead of time for it. In our case, that meant entering the lottery on March 1st and waiting for the winners to be announced April 13th. It was a long 5 weeks and I wasn’t sure at all if we’d win it. Chances of winning around 30% typically and that wasn’t with the addition that we were aiming for a holiday weekend. I submitted an application for it and we had friends of ours who submitted five different applications! You can only apply once per person, but you can choose how many people you will have in your group.

While our friends didn’t win at all, I WON!!!!!!! This made for a VERY exciting Monday morning for us and I was so thrilled to be that much closer to going! This was the main hurdle to overcome and we had made it. Now one more step.

Second little known fact, while campsites in national parks fill up extremely quickly, Yosemite is the most requested camping area in the country! Who knew? Because of this they open camping availability on a schedule. For the time we were looking at (September) the campground availability opened today, April 15th. I had done a ton of research on this on the website as they say it can completely sell out in as little as 10 seconds. Yikes, talk about pressure! The website included a link to the official government time clock and encouraged everyone to have it open on one screen so that you can click on the reservation the very second it reached 9:00am Central time.

On top of that, they recommended you to “practice” following the steps to make a reservation several times in order to ensure you are fully familiar with the website- oh my goodness! We had created our recreation.gov accounts earlier and made sure to be signed in prior to 9:00am. We plugged in our dates, and we each chose a different campground to aim for when 9:00am hit as there are three all near the Half Dome trailhead. We also decided NOT to click on the first available campsite on the list in hopes that while everyone else was focusing on that one, we could snag one much farther down the way. We had our credit cards out and ready as well, though once you are given the green light that a site is available you do have 15 minutes to complete the payment screens.

I was pretty stressed, knowing that there would be other campsite options and hotel options available hopefully outside the park- but these were really expensive (hotels) or far away to have to drive into the park for (private campgrounds). I really just wanted to be able to stay in the park and avoid extra hours of driving each day, especially as we would need to start the Half Dome hike really early in the morning.

9:00am hit and we both clicked on the reservation button right away. I began panicking as I went through 5 different campsites and they ALL kept coming back as no longer available! Finally I was able to find one, process all the payments and we received the confirmation email and were good to go!

So this story has a very happy ending as we’re excited to head to Yosemite in 5 months. I had already made our flight reservations on Southwest as I found cheap mile requirements and they’re 100% refundable anyway. So all we have left is a rental car and we’ll be on our way.

If anyone else out there is interested in Yosemite, GO FOR IT! Just make sure to plan far enough ahead and read carefully through their website so that you are fully prepared for any reservations you’re wanting to make. Stay tuned to hear how the trip goes a few months from now!