Day 2
2.50 + 3 = 9?
Yellowstone National Park
Yellowstone - there is a reason thousands of people flock to the United States oldest national park. It. Is. Gorgeous! Good thing too because we spent a lot of time sitting and waiting for traffic. A LOT.
Instead of 2.5 hours from Idaho Falls to the Old Faithful visitors center, it took 5 hours. We left at 8:00am and pulled in around 1:00pm.
Missing Old Faithful
All that driving and we didn’t see Old Faithful erupt. We missed it by 10 minutes because of silly people not following the park rules when viewing wildlife. They just stopped in the middle of the road instead of pulling over. And there was lots of wildlife to see. Bison, a variety of birds, sheep, elk, deer… no predators though. Yellowstone is also home to grizzly bears, black bears, mountain lions, and wolves. We saw plenty of herbivores though. I did have to add a picture of the fisherman in his natural habitat as he fly fishes along the rivers. (That’s for my father and my father-in-law who are fishing buddies. 😉)
Change of Plans
So we pulled in and parked at the visitors center around 1pm. We found out that the next predicted eruption time was between 2:15-2:45pm. We decided to eat lunch, head into the gift shop (Mackenzie was IN LOVE with the polished stone collection), and check out the geyser. We also stopped to take a quick picture from a teepee set up by the geyser by the local Native American tribe. It was really neat. We planned on staying but it started raining and hailing!
Drenched!
We were not prepared for that weather and, by the time we made it back to the car in under 3 minutes, we were drenched! The kind of drenched where you feel water running down your face! It was really wet. And the hail was the kind that stung when it hit. So we decided the picture in front of the non-erupting Old Faithful geyser would suffice. Lol. All in all, it made for a fun memory. 😊
We left the park and headed to Burlington, Wyoming where my dad grew up. We are staying with friends of his. They are so gracious and kind to let us stay here. They hosted a gathering with many of my dads friends and classmates from when he grew up here. It was really neat to hear stories about my dad and my grandparents. It just reaffirms my belief that there are kind people everywhere!
Day 2 was a success and I’m excited for the next day’s adventure!