We had rented a cabin in Wawona for the week, our first large family vacation since Maui four years ago. On the books for the week were several excursions into Yosemite Valley, among other nearby attractions, and this initial visit to the Valley centered first around getting most of the ladies to a sketching class at Yosemite Village while Chris, Pedro, Carter, and Barbara took the boys to a Junior Ranger program at Happy Isles. We had heard that parking places in the Valley would all be taken by 8:30am, which certainly seemed to be the case when we were directed into the main Yosemite Village lot about that time – we creatively found a narrow spot at the end of a row and made our way to the nearest shuttle stop in order to get to Happy Isles some two miles distant by 9:30. Well, after standing in line watching several packed buses go by 9:15, it was apparent we weren’t going to make the talk. So we wandered about Yosemite Village a bit before deciding to get on a relatively empty bus at another stop, eventually making our way to Happy Isles by 10:30 after riding most of the shuttle bus circuit. We first made our way about a quarter-mile south to the Nature Center, where the boys thoroughly enjoyed the various exhibits – they were particularly impressed with the nighttime room, where the park’s nocturnal creatures are depicted in a moonlit setting. We then walked all the foot trails southeast of the Nature Center, where sturdy bridges allow access to the two adjacent islands amid the churning flow of the Merced River, as full as ever even in July. While the day’s high was expected to be in the low 90s, it was actually quite chilly along the water. Making our way back to the bus stop, we came across a solitary doe grazing along a paved access road, although she flitted away into the forest at our approach. After lunch on a fallen tree, we got aboard the bus back to Yosemite Village where another Junior Ranger talk was scheduled for 2:00pm – didn’t set the GPS but we figure just over 3/4-mile for the little trip.