One weekend in the USA

I was in the US on an business visit during feb 2005. On one of the weekends, I was with my close pals Junaid and Pavan. We were having dinner and were thinking of what to do on the weekend. Pavan was on google finding out the places to visit. At 9.20 p.m, he said that we could go to death valley. But we didn't have a car and we had to rent one. We couldn't rent a car so late in the night. The only place where we could rent a car was San Francisco airport which was 50 miles away and, the last train to SFO was at 9.40 PM, i.e, we had 20 minutes to catch the train. We had still not completed having our dinner. We quickly finished eating and started out of the house at 9.30 p.m. The railway station was 2 kms away from where we stayed. There was no time to call a taxi. We started running and reached the station 3 minutes before the train arrived. Pavan quickly fished out some change to buy tickets and bought the tickets. We then boarded the train to reach SFO airport and rented a car at 12.30 AM on saturday.
We went on a really long drive on saturday. Covered 800 miles (around 1300 KM) in less than 24 hours. This was the longest journey I have done on road in the shortest interval of time. We wanted to go to Death valley, but after 5 hours of drive, decided to change the plans a little and headed towards King canyon national park. En route, we reached a place called lake isabelle . It was a huuuuge lake stretching miles together. It was surrounded by mountain peaks on all sides. It reminded me of leh ladakh photos I had seen. It was a cold desert. There was not much vegetation around. But the approach to the place was through hilly terrain with a deep valley on one side, with a river flowing. It was very picturesque. We headed towards king canyon from lake isabelle with the idea of reaching SFO via yosemite. The peak we were supposed to reach was 9000 ft above sea level. The route welcomed us with snow peak mountains. A sudden change of climate from a warm sunny weather to snow and some chill weather. There were more rivers and waterfalls on the route. There was a heavy snow in that region the previous week and the route was closed. So we couldn't proceed much further from there.
We retraced our route and headed back to lake isabelle. We had now circled the lake. We headed to SFO through Sequoia National Park. More mountains, more snow, and lot of fog welcomed us. The visibility dropped to 20 mts. There were really very sharp curves with slippery roads. At 4.00 p.m we felt that it was 7.00 PM. 27 miles in those snow mountains took us close to an hour.
Now the vegetation changed completely. It was now a green carpet for miles together. Lush green meadows with cows, horses and ranches all around. The country side here is really beautiful. Probably, only on the country side you will find children playing on the streets.
By around 12.30 a.m we reached SFO airport back. After returning the car, we took a train and headed back home. We were shivering when we reached home at 2.30 a.m. It was a very memorable weekend for me.

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