Need help planing SF/Yosemite trip (long)

NCRedding

I've strayed
Joined
Feb 4, 2000
We're heading to California over Easter break. We're flying into San Jose, arriving late on Friday night. We want to see Monterey, Yosemite, and need to see DH's aunt and uncle in Santa Rosa before heading into SF.

I have three options: Monterey for Saturday, staying Sat. night; go to Yosemite, stay 2 nights; one night in Santa Rosa/Napa; then into SF, for 2 nights at one hotel, moving to another hotel on Friday (for a convention, not my choice).

2nd option: Skip Monterey, go to Yosmite for 2 nights; Santa Rosa for 1 night, remainder of time in SF.

3rd option: do Monterey, shorten the overnights in Yosemite to 1, add 1 day to SF.

DH and I have been to SF and Wine Country, DD (14) has not. We don't plan to hike in Yosemite, just see the sights. I think some of the roads will still be closed since we're going in early April.

Any recommendations would be welcome. Thanks
 
thats allot of driving with any option! i think you need to plan how much actual time you want in each of the destinations before you decide how many nights you will spend at each. you have to figure that from either san jose or monteray to yosemite you will have (with best road conditions) about a 4 hour drive-and coming back from yosemite you will have a BARE MINIMUM 5 hour drive to santa rosa ( i say bare minimum because you are going to hit traffic no matter which route into santa rosa you take-and depending on the day/time it could add a couple hours more).

if it were me and it was a late night flight arrival i'de be willing to drive to monteray that night-but if i was going to yosemite no way would i try until morning (the roads are just not something i would want to do at night-and depending on the weather/how this winter damages them they can get pretty nasty).

you know san francisco to santa rosa is'nt too bad a drive-so unless you realy want to spend the night there you might be able to do your monteray and yosemite stuff, travel on to san francisco and then just do a day trip over.
 
You're trip plans has you going in a lot of different directions. Given a start location of San Jose, Monterey is south, Yosemite is south and east, San Francisco is north and Santa Rosa is north. Getting to Yosemite will be the hard one because it's all by itself. I would think in April the roads won't be too bad (your not going over the pass to Mono Lake, so you should be okay). Though depending on the weather you might want to have chains or a 4-wheel drive.

Getting from San Jose to Monterey isn't too bad (~about 2 hour drive). There's a great aquarium (Monterey Bay Aquarium) to go see and other stuff along Canery Row. From Monterey to Yosemite is a hard drive. I don't know that it's all the scenic or fun.

You might consider looking at what things are along the coast that you could do. There's lots to see either further south or up in the north.
 
I live in Sacramento and grew up in SF. I go to Monterey at least once a year. If you HAVE to go to all those places. I would go from SJ to Monterey, then to SF, then to Santa Rosa. From Santa Rosa I would go to Yosemite by way of hwy 49(nice drive through the gold rush towns, etc.).

I'm sure there's a much faster, less scenic way to do it though, LOL.
 



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