5.15am: time to wake up. Being extra careful in order to bother your three roommates at the youth hostel as little as possible, you do your best to get dressed and head for the lobby. After a while, the tour guide arrives and you get in the van with your partners for the day.

Heading out from San Francisco, you cross the Bay Bridge and enjoy the beautiful views of the city at dawn. Feeling still a bit groggy from the lack of sleep, you hesitate for a second between dream and reality.

All of a sudden, a bunch of metallic structures appear on the horizon. No, they are not the AT-AT walkers from Star Wars, although some people say that they were the source of Lucas’s inspiration a long, long time ago in a galaxy not so far away.

Inevitably, you fall asleep after a while. When you wake up, you find yourself surrounded by mountains, trees and little creeks. Yosemite awaits.

The tour guides starts reciting the usual compilation of encyclopedic facts about the place, including a story about how a bunch of explorers where - literally - “the first people to arrive at the place” and how, when they did, they actually decided to name the place after the word that - literally - “the native Indians who lived there at the time” kept on repeating at them. Americans… you simply have to love them! ;-)

Anyway, once inside the park you are taken to a place called “Inspiration Point”. Feelings of wonderment and awe suddenly arise. Possibly one of the most beautiful sights that you’ve had the pleasure to enjoy in your whole life, (in my case, mainly rivaled by those from the Grand Canyon a couple of months ago). Natural magnificence at its best.

Next stop is at El Capitan, a giant rock I-can’t-remember- how-many-times bigger than Gibraltar that becomes the object of desire for legions of climbers every year.

After this, you have your lunch in an area near the waterfalls and the visitor center. Unfortunately, the falls are almost dry at this time of the year. Still, the place is total bliss.

Back to the van. Time to visit the forest of giant sequoias, some of which apparently get to be the biggest living beings on earth. When you try to embrace one of them, you realize that they are not precisely small, as shown in the picture.

Before you leave the park, you go through the only dark episode of the trip: a ferocious, angry, California bear spots your van and starts running after you. Luckily enough, he is more into chocolate than into human flesh and you manage to bribe him with a bunch of M&Ms and a couple of Kit-Kats! Scary, isn't it? ;-)

Back in San Francisco, the long day closes. A hot shower feels great, as does a nice meal at a local diner. The place feels as cheesy as they get: you know the picture, decoration and music from the 60s or the 70s, everything seems to have been taken out of a movie, Grease for example, including the waitress’s uniforms (although I don’t remember the waitresses in those movies being Mexican… after all, times are a changing! ;-). Wow, does it feel great or what? A greasy gigantic burger with French fries and lots of mayo and ketchup; the quintessence of unhealthy decadent delight. It even has some avocado… must be the Californian touch. You simply love it, although both the milkshakes and the coke with vanilla ice-cream floats seem a bit too much and you decide to pass on them. After all, everything has a limit, and quintessential, unhealthy, decadent delights are no exception.

No longer hungry, you decide to go for a movie. Stardust is your choice, and you don’t regret it. Certainly, you wouldn’t call it a masterpiece… but hey, it provides entertainment for a couple of hours, and it makes you laugh at several points with a rather British sense of humor.

Even better, ‘Stardust’ also provides a memorable quote that will survive for many years inside your brain:

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