Summer is here with temperature constantly hitting 90 degree during day time. It's the traveling season so we hit down the road to Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park, located at 4-hour drive south-east to Bay Area. It's a CMU alumni trip with 3 HKs, 1 taiwanese and 1 malaysian. We started from renting a SUV at San Jose Airport. With high gas price in mind, we tried to avoid the US made gas-hungry model and ended up with a Suzuki XL7. Suzuki is generally synonymous to motorcycle but I must say the SUV we had is not bad at all.

I always enjoy visiting the US national parks. Yosemite and Grand Canyon both didn't fail me so i have high expectation for Sequoia too. We were taking highway 180 E, entering the park through its north entrance. Along the way the scenery isn't that spectacular and I was kinda disappointed. We arrived the park around 1pm. Since it's a day trip, the time limitation didn't allow us to do extensive hikes which usually promise better view. In the end, we settled with a 3.7-mile Little Baldy trail, a relatively easy hike, and when we reached the top, the view is surprisingly breathtaking!

my friend doing his cool thing!

The main attraction of Sequoia is the biggest tree (in terms of volume) in the world. The tree is named Sherman Tree. Frankly I am not awed by it at all. It doesn't look that big to me:

We proceed to Moro Rock, a granite dome, something similar to Yosemite Half-dome but smaller scale. But still the view up the top is awesome too:

We left Sequoia around 7pm and arrived home around 12am. With all the fun people and great scenery, I gave this trip 10/10. I am thinking of visiting Death Valley sometime soon, but maybe visiting a desert during summer is not a good idea.

On the way back home, we saw a terrible accident that involves about 5 cars. One of them was totally crushed. Just a few days ago I watched a taiwanese variety show, and one of the joke goes like this: 如果超车成功的话，你会早一分钟到家，如果失败的话，要七天后才到家。 Witty but so true!