Our Adventure: Yellowstone

Yikey shnikeys, is Yellowstone ever gorgeous!!! Of course I need to first back up to our Saturday morning in Thermopolis, WY, and the cutest little 14th-month-old baby ever!

 Sorry the pictures aren't great, but he kept doing the double point thing and it was new and cute and I had to capture it. I just love this little guy with a capital SQUEEZE!

We ate the free waffles at our overpriced motel, made another round of sandwiches for our lunch, and headed out for the last two hours before Yellowstone! I have wanted to visit Yellowstone since my family went with out me one summer when I was at summer camp. :)

The drive from Thermopolis over to Cody was beautiful, majestic and rugged. The country just looks wild, and you can imagine the horrible storms they must have in the winter!

My boys stopped to, um, water the bushes and I got some shots that were actually in focus!

Oh look! Wildlife! Oh, wait, it's the bush-waterers. 

I sure love these boys. Especially the tall one. :)

It didn't seem long before we were in Cody, WY. Despite this boring picture, the town is equal parts tourist and cute and frontier. I loved it. You know, from the comfort of my car.

It seemed to take forever from Cody to Yellowstone! The Buffalo Bill Reservoir and the Shoshone River were really pretty and blue. 

I couldn't stop taking pictures of these lodges! Now this is my style! 

How fun to run a year-round B&B with back-country tours and all of the local knowledge to spread to the tourists!

 

At last we were at the park entrance--which I got zero pictures of! We were finishing lunch, Jared needed to pee and there was a wedding party posing by the 'Welcome to Yellowstone' sign.

I have no shame. I had to include these sweet wildflowers, but I didn't take the time to stop and take real pictures. No, I rolled down the window and stuck my camera outside... Sorry they're blurry.

Yellowstone Lake!

It would be great fun to spend a whole summer in Yellowstone. We keep talking about returning in about 10 years when the boys are old enough for some real hiking. We'd bring a small trailer and be able to fix some food, store our gear and be able to go to various camp sites and see what there is to see! 

 

We played tourists at Old Faithful.

Here is Old Faithful before the geyser goes off. 

And here is the attention it draws on a Saturday afternoon in July:

(Gorgeous lodge, by the way!)

There she blows!

We took a little loop hike to see more geysers, but first saw this little stream.  

It was hot and crowded and Josiah was crying by the end (he was in a stroller, not walking, and it seemed like he was hungry and tired and hot. Poor baby!), but Jonathan and Jared did a great job!

(Where did that little tongue come from?!)

We ate delicious vegetable lasagna at this cafeteria--and we got to see they geyser blow again while were there!

We were pretty worn out after all of our traveling recently, so we headed for a hotel.

This bison was stopping traffic as it was calmly sitting by the side of the road!

Another bad picture alert: this time with junk from the wind shield, but the steamy water was really cool, along with even more small geysers.

And then, stopping more traffic, was an elk! I had to majorly crop these pictures to get other tourists out of the way. It only seems like we were in the wild--really there were roads and cars and people all over!

A couple miles later there was this herd of elk. Not so many tourists either, because these dudes were farther away from the road.

Speaking of dudes, we're staying at the Dude Motel in West Yellowstone, Montana! We bathed the boys and got them in bed early because they missed even a brief nap in the car.

Tomorrow: more Yellowstone, then headed south through Grand Tetons!