Fri Oct 14, 2016 – Mon Oct 17, 2016

Our first trip to find the autumn leaves since our now 3-year old boy William was born.

The weather forecast said the storm was coming to Mammoth Lakes on late Friday till Monday.  All we could do was to hope that the forecast would change.

We stayed at the Juniper Spring Resort, which is only a few minutes drive from the Mammoth Lake downtown.

We left our house around 8:30 AM; Our first stop on the way to Mammoth Lakes was Thien Vien Chan Nguyen (thienvienchannguyen.net, 20635 US-395, Adelanto, CA 92302), which is about 3 hours driving from Orange County.  The place is beautiful and quiet because there were only a few ladies who were kneeling and praying in front of those huge Buddha statues.

William loved it here; he ran around so fast that I had a hard time catching up.  Luckily the place is big and clean. We let William had lunch here because it was about 12pm.    After his lunch, we continued our little road trip.   After drinking his milk, he felt asleep very easily.

There was no traffic at all so by the time we got to Bishop it was about 4 PM.  Still a little bit early so we decided to check out the autumn leaves at the Rock Creek Canyon.  It was passed peak but there were still few places the leaves were still good with beautiful yellow color.  It was so windy though; so we took only a few pictures then continued our way to Mammoth Lakes which is about 40 minute more driving.

When we got to the hotel, the wind was stronger and it was so cold.  Looked like the rain had just stopped because the road were all wet.  Check-in was easy; we got the room in a different building than the main building which is in the back.   We had a little trouble with opening the parking garage gate.  Put in the room key but the door would not open.  I called the hotel for help, they said they’d come down but lucky for us someone was on their way out of the garage so the gate opened. So we sneaked in :).

The room was nice with a beautiful view of the mountain.  William loved the new place: he ran around touching this & that.  After a long driving trip I thought he would be tired but obviously he was not.