Wednesday June 10

Yellowstone, here we come!

After a good night's sleep in our hotel,

we headed to Maverick for a breakfast burrito,

fueled up the car and headed north.

It was a lovely day.

A nice 4+ hour drive.

There was a bit of a line at the front gates.

Everybody is excited the park has finally opened!

("Soft" opening - lots of things still closed...)

The animals have had the run of the park for 3 months.

I'm not sure they were excited to see the people return...

As we first pulled into the park we saw a wolf,

eating something "large"... but where we stopped

we were directly behind some trees so I didn't

get a photo of it.

But there were plenty of Bison and Elk

(thanks for the clarification Dad!)

For our first day we took the northern loop

which is primarily woods and mountains

and LOTS of beautiful waterfalls!

Including the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone.

Wow!

We just kept thinking about those poor

explorers and pioneers - what do you do when

confronted with THIS???

This was the Dragon's Breath cave...

It looked like a dragon was in there,

breathing smoke and fire!

(We are listening to the Harry Potter books

on my Kindle, so dragons were very much on

our brains anyway... lol)

Kyle brought his big camera and got some EXCELLENT photos!

Still working on those selfies... 

It was a beautifully sunny day, but still a bit chilly.

Especially with the wind coming off all that 

cold mountain water!

 There were plenty of beautiful pools.

We learned that the brighter blue, the HOTTER

the water is!

We figure these are about 166 degrees!

Yowsa!

We took every little side road we saw which

brought us to some truly spectacular views!

We did LOTS of walking!

And ended up at Old Faithful.

(This is a geyser we who were waiting for

Old Faithful started calling NEW Faithful...)

I only took video of Old Faithful...

On the way out of the park was a giant lake!

And lots more bison!

Several of them quite close!

Hi Cuz!

Out the park gate and right into West Yellowstone

where Kyle had reserved a room for us in a hotel.

That's pretty much all West Yellowstone is...

hotels, motels, eateries, and a couple of gas stations.

We didn't get back until after dark (we never want 

to waste a minute of sunlight...)

and by then we were STARVING!

The hotel guy was pretty helpful and recommended

a nice little restaurant with good pizza called

Gushers.

We looked at it on Google Maps - it was literally

across the street! So we took our stuff up to

our room and then bundled up (it got chilly once

the sun went down!) and walked on over

to pick up a delicious Hawaiian pizza.

Ate it in our room and then SLEEP!!!

Another fantastic day!