The Yellowstone Trek - day 2

Woke up bright and early in Provo, ate our "breakfast is included" meal at the hotel, and headed off. With pages of games and things to do downloaded from the internet, the boys settled on the "counting cows" game, and "finding license plates" game. But mom had a twist -- you had to find the state on the blank U.S. map, and cross it off there. Matt was the official map marker-offer.

After driving through Salt Lake City, on the perpetually under construction I-15, we hit miles of rolling hills and farmland. The first official viewpoint of the day, a few hours in, was Idaho Falls. I could live there, except for this little weather phenomenon called snow.

We pulled into MT around 1pm, where mom promptly declared the car a No Electronics zone. The PSP, the DVD player, and their mp3's had to get turned off. There was no way we drove 18-hrs to get here and they were going to have their heads buried in a movie they had each seen 184 times before.

Purchased an America the Beautiful pass and headed on in to do the north loop of the park. "Dont worry, it's a short drive, you can do it in five hours. Tons of wildlife on this loop". Are you kidding, lady? I've only been in the car six hours already!

But the promise of seeing lots of animals made us press on. We saw a deer grazing on the side of the road, and one bison in a meadow about 1000 yards from us. Lots of pretty scenery, but not lots of wildlife.

So we schlepped on, looking for geyers and driving through forest-y type landscapes. Came across tons of pretty scenery, including mountain meadows, rivers, several waterfalls, and eventually geysers.

We knew what NOT to do when we found animals, courtesy of a woman who had been charged by a bison the week before. Her fate was all over YouTube, so I showed the boys what we would not be doing if we found them.

The northern loop reminds me of Yosemite's back country.

Kevin and I briefly walked around Norris geyser basin, and found a couple enormous pools along the path. It was late afternoon, and we were pretty dang tired by this time of day.

The river flowing alongside the road in and out of West Yellowstone was just so peaceful. We saw a man sitting in a chair next to his car each morning just soaking it all in.