I‘m sitting in my tent now, listening to the river rushing over rocks, laughter of children and the foreign now familiar Spanish language. We spent the day travelling from the not so wilderness of Yosemite Valley, to sprawling highways and chain warehouses and then looping back out again to wine country. The outskirts of Sequoia look quaint but wrong, grapevines growing out of pure sand, a parched rocky hill with a perfectly square acre of lush grass around the Italianate farmhouse. The lush green fields of mandarin and lemon look incongruous alongside drought riddled fields. The light is golden, the sun so warm that not even the overcast skies can keep out its rays.

In the now dark, Sequoia holds all the promise of a new day. What we have seen so far is exciting: rolling hills of red and green, paths running alongside rivers blushed with wildflowers. It is more relaxed here, people being within nature rather than admiring it at arms length. On my brief trot down a path I encountered a pair of women fresh from a swim slightly embarrassed in their underwear and then try as I might taking this path and that kept running into them, a maze where ever path leads to stripey underwear! I’ll see you tomorrow when the sun rises.