The people manning the entry point and ranger station at the highway 120 entry point to Yosemite have to be some of the dumbest specimens of humanity I’ve ever encountered.<\/p>\n
I pre-purchased an annual National Parks Pass specifically to avoid some of these hassles. It took me about 20 minutes to make it to the head of the line, which I initially thought was because of the visitors, not the staff. Boy, was I wrong…<\/p>\n
When I made it to the head of the line, I handed in my pass and said “I need a window decal because this is an open car” (the literature I got with the pass said that window decals are available for convertibles, motorcycles, etc. because the standard procedure is to hang the annual pass from the rear-view mirror, where anyone could just take it).<\/p>\n
They acted like they’d never seen an annual pass before, and then proceeded to have a 10-minute debate, involving 2 additional employees and a phone conversation. They then asked to see my car’s registration, which I handed over. Despite having a huge “05\/2011” expiration date on it, they proceeded to tell me it was expired. After another 5 minutes, additional employee, and another phone call, I got my registration and annual pass back and was handed the window decal and park newspaper \/ map.<\/p>\n
Rather than blocking the entry gate, I pulled into the ranger station \/ visitor center so I could put all my paperwork away.<\/p>\n
By this time I was incredibly hot and thirsty. There was a water vending machine there (while I had water in the car, it was hot and I wanted a cold one). It was sold out of all water. There was also a soda machine which had a dollar bill slot that wouldn’t take any of the 6 bills I tried.<\/p>\n
I went into the information center \/ ranger station and explained (after waiting on line, again) that both vending machines were broken, and asked if I could swap 2 $1 bills for 8 quarters from their tip jar. They refused. They then told me that the next water was 6 miles down the road at Crane Flat, and that I could complain about the broken vending machines there.<\/p>\n
As I slowly made my way out of the information center and back to the Atom, I discovered that there was a working drinking fountain around the side of the building.<\/p>\n
Idiots.<\/p>\n
I reserve a special spot in hell for fools like these.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The people manning the entry point and ranger station at the highway 120 entry point to Yosemite have to be some of the dumbest specimens of humanity I’ve ever encountered. I pre-purchased an annual National Parks Pass specifically to avoid some of these hassles. It took me about 20 minutes to make it to the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.atomacrossamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.atomacrossamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.atomacrossamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.atomacrossamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.atomacrossamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=208"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.atomacrossamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":210,"href":"http:\/\/www.atomacrossamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208\/revisions\/210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.atomacrossamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.atomacrossamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.atomacrossamerica.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}