Travelogue: Yellowstone

Is anyone getting burned out on hearing about our vacation?  I'm getting a little burned out on talking about it, and I haven't even hit the rodeo, or Denver, or the rest of Colorado.  I think I'm going to try to cram the rest of the vacation into two or three more posts.  I actually have other stuff to talk about!

Yellowstone was really great, even if we did practically run through it. I remember going to Old Faithful when I was a kid, and being distinctly unimpressed. I mentioned it to my mom a couple years ago. and she remarked that we were all exhausted from a long day's drive; no one was really thrilled to be there.  I also saw Yellowstone in the winter via snowmobile one year, which was really cool.  That's where I stupidly stopped way too close to a bison to get a picture of it and got reamed out (deservedly so) by my stepmom.

This year, we got into the park early. I did not remember seeing any waterfalls in Yellowstone (though I can't imagine we would pass them up), so that was a big priority for me.  They don't disappoint. 

Soooooo many photo opportunities!  I ended up with 38 pages in the album--most places got one page.  Yellowstone has four. 

The wildlife was prevalent, too. We saw about 40 bison over the course of the day, including some babies.  I didn't get any good pictures of the calves, because they were quite a ways off from the road, and it was toward the end of the day and Jeff had no intention of stopping. 

My favorite picture of the whole trip is "my" bear. There were a TON of cars parked along the sides of the road, so we weren't going anywhere right away, so I decided to get out and see what I could get.  There were a lot of people much closer than I was, and I only took three pics ("c'mon, quit eating whatever's on the ground, pick up your head so I can see you, ok, got it!") before I scampered back to the car.  We managed to make our way out, just as we saw an extremely irritated looking ranger driving in with his lights flashing.

Yellowstone was Lauren's first ranger badge, and she put a lot of work into it.  There was a whole booklet of questions, and we were lucky enough to catch a ranger talk (about bears, no less!)

We also stopped at the Paint Pots, which I did remember as being pretty cool.  The thing I noticed most on this trip was the number of footprints that were off the boardwalk. A ranger told us that she had to tell people to stay on the boardwalk at least a few times a day.  Their excuse is usually that they want to get a picture.  Ahem. 

Our last big stop was Old Faithful, where Lauren finished her booklet while we were waiting for it to go off. 

It was probably the most packed day we had, even though there were a lot of things we missed, too. It's high on the priority list for a return visit.