The Long and Winding Road Back . . . Day 3

After I waited for three hours and paid the Rexburg repair shop $38 to tell me that we didn't have to worry about the ABS and brake lights on the dashboard, we headed for Yellowstone, the first of three "tourist" stops in our itinerary. We arrived at the west entrance, paid our $25 per car admission fee and then immediately hit a traffic jam. So we pulled off the road to look at a stream and Jordan climbed up on a rock. MelodyJoy wanted to join him, of course . . .

When we hopped back in our vehicles, we quickly discovered what had caused the traffic tie-up, as a huge bison strolled right down the road past us . . .

Our next stop was at the Fountain Paint Pots. It was a beautiful day with puffy clouds against a bright blue sky . . .


Naturally, Old Faithful was our primary destination. We arrived just after it had geysered (is that a word?) so we had to wait over an hour for its next eruption. We sat down in a grove of trees to eat our peanut butter and honey sandwiches, then claimed some prime seats to await the big event . . .

Unfortunately, as we sat there, we could see the storm clouds start to roll in. Jeannette retrieved our sweatshirts from the truck and we waited in the drizzle, which gradually turned into a downpour. (When we were last in Yellowstone, in the summer of 1995 on our move to Kentucky, we experienced rain, sleet, snow and mudslides, so a little rain wasn't going to faze us.)

With the rain coming down, though, when Old Faithful did erupt (right on time), there wasn't much to see really. The rain caused lots of extra steam which threatened to obscure our entire view of the geyser.

We considered driving up to the canyon in the middle of Yellowstone, since the kids have never seen the Grand Canyon, but the rainfall dissuaded us from this, which was fortunate since it took us quite awhile to get out of the park due to road construction. We did make a quick stop at the Kepler Cascades waterfall . . .

And the boys and I made a brief dash through another geyser basin . . .

Our destination upon departing Yellowstone was Cody, Wyoming. This has been a challenging trip in some ways because we didn't know much in advance when we would travel or where we would need to spend the nights. As it's turned out, with only one small exception, our itinerary has been almost exactly as we planned originally. If we had known this would be true, we could have done better than a dumpy Econolodge for $175 a night! As it was, we tried to just be grateful to have any place to stay within 50 miles of Yellowstone.

From Yellowstone, we headed to Mount Rushmore, but I'll save that for tomorrow's post since it's almost 11:00 and I spent about nine hours today trekking all over the Noah's Ark waterpark in Wisconsin Dells, so I'm pretty whipped.