Hi, I'm Steve and my family just returned from a week in Yosemite staying at the house keeping units. So I thought I'd make this little informational video because I sure wish I had found the video like this before we went to Yosemite because it was a savings lot of time and trouble. Well, it's just my public service announcement. If you're going to Yosemite, and specifically staying in the house keeping units, first of all, when you reserve the units, which I'll talk about in a moment, it will say that it's sleep 6. Understand that when it says it's sleep 6, it means that at least two people will be sleeping on the floor on the concrete because there are only two bunk beds and one double bed. That's it. Maybe that sleeps 4, but it will hold 6 and we need to have an inflatable air mattress, which is essential or thermorescence if you have more than 6 or more than 4. So that's first rule of thumb. Sleep 6 means it sleeps 4 plus 2 on the floor. The second important thing is to remember that in the valley, everybody must store all their food in bare boxes. You cannot leave coolers sitting out with food or shampoo or soap or perfume or toothpaste or anything else in them. So everything that you bring has to fit in a bare box. Now, that's not so bad if you have a small group or you're only staying a couple of days, but in our case, there were six of us and we stayed for five full days. That's a lot of food. We made a big mistake. We went to Costco and bought one of those huge 165-quart coolers. Bad move. Don't do that in your semity because those gigantic coolers do not fit in the bare box. What we had to do was take our monstrous cooler and leave it at the Ranger Station, at the far end of the campground. Whenever we needed some frozen sausage or orange juice or anything else, we had to walk or bicycle over to the Ranger Station, take it out of our cooler and bring it back to our campsite. We survived just fine, but what I'm recommending to you is bring smaller coolers. The bare boxes are big. You get two of them and they're very deep and a cooler fits in there nicely if it's the right size. In fact, several coolers fit. That's fine. Alright, so we just got here. What are your first impressions? It's pretty small. There's not a lot of room for six people. It does not seem to say campground for six with three beds. My ass. George Jr. It's for really close people. Yeah. Love your brother. Reserving housekeeping. You can reserve it on the internet. There is a website by Delaware Industry Companies or whatever the heck their name is. It runs a place. So they have it written here somewhere. Delaware and North. They have a nice website and it has a calendar. You can pick your dates and reserve. Pay with a credit card and you're all done and that's fine. You don't have any choice in where in the complex you get to stay. You see there is a river here. The river runs through it, so to speak. And this is the campsite. I recommend that you reserve by phone and you can go to the website and get the phone number and call because then you can negotiate trying to get something close to the river. In fact, they divide it up into two categories. You can get your campsites near the river or not near the river. My advice is you want to be near the river. Now they cluster these campsites in the alphabetic groups. You have A through J. The river side units are A, K and J. So I don't think you'd be able to reserve a specific numbered unit but you should be able to reserve an area. And if that's the case, you want to ask for A, K or J because that was a river side. Now here's another trick about reserving at the housekeeping units. Of course you want to call as early as possible. Once you can reserve up to a year and a day in advance. So reserve as early as possible. But here's the trick. Let's say you want five days by the river with your family and you call and they say, I'm sorry, all we've got is one day back by the road. Take it. Take that one night and reserve it. And then what you do is you continue to call periodically and see if there are any cancellations. And so if you reserve for a day, you say, can I get in a second day, a third day, a fourth day, a fifth day? Can I get closer to the rivers, anything open? That's what we did. We started with crap, okay? But by persistently calling because you see the nice thing about this when you reserve, they take your credit card but they don't charge you. And there's no penalty for canceling all the way up to one week before you arrive. So a lot of people cancel. They reserve just to make sure they have something, you know, and they change their mind. Price of gas goes up or somebody dies in the family or the dog gets sick or whatever. So we started with little to nothing and we just kept calling and every time we called, you know, not every time, but, you know, we were able to get five nights by the river by being persistent. So I strongly recommend that. There are a couple of sites to watch for. Hope you don't get them before we do because we're going next year. But anywhere in the A units, 255, 254, 253, 252, 251, 250. Those are all beautiful, beautiful sites. Also, 259 and 258, very nice because they're right on the river and there's a little beach next to it. So if you have kids, kids can run down and play on the beach. Now, at the far end, that's the A that's here. If you go to J over here and you reserve in that area, there's a bridge that crosses the Merced. It comes right out at Yosemite Village in the wanting hotel. So if you want easy access to Yosemite Village, then you would ask for the J area and you get to cross the bridge. But wherever you stay, when you're out there on the edge, you look to your left and there's your Semite Falls, you look to your right and there's Half Dome. So you can't lose at the housekeeping units. I don't know what else to tell you other than there is electricity. And what a lot of people do when they're return visitors is they decorate their unit. A lot of people, us included, we brought rope lights and strung them around the unit. Kind of let the place up. That's nice at night when you're coming back from the bathroom or something to spot your site because you see the blue light and distance or something like that. And it's also fun. So it's a ball. The housekeeping units are about $75 a night. They charge it a little extra with extra people. But I tell you what, it's worth it for a couple of reasons. One, it's not that expensive for what you get. And number two, the cheap sites, like the tent sites, you know, and RV sites, they go so fast that it's like buying tickets to a Beatles revival or reunion. They're only available five months in advance. And the morning that they go on sale at 7 a.m., sometimes by 7.05 a.m., everything's sold out. So it's really hard to get. As soon as you pay a little bit more, like a curry village tent, you can get. And those are nice, but you can't cook there. Oh, that's the other point. The housekeeping units are the only lodging in the valley, except for tent sites and RV sites. It's only lodging where you can cook. If you get curry village because they have tents, it's beautiful. There's a pool, a lot of amenities, rafting, horseback riding, bicycling and everything. But you can't cook. So you've got either go to a picnic ground to cook, or you have to eat in the restaurant or eat cold food or something. So if you want to save money, spend a little. Get a housekeeping unit. It's a big happy family there. Get to cook your own meals. And it's a whole lot of fun. So I hope this was of some use to you. And I know I talk a lot, so I could probably set all this in half as many words, but, you know, what can you do? It's free. It's YouTube. So enjoy and we'll see you there in June of 2009. Look for a guy. I'm going to set this. Thank you.