Yellowstone

It was a beautiful morning and the view from our campground was awesome!

We spent the day driving around Yellowstone and doing short walks and eating.

We saw a geyser and a hotspring, ate lunch on top of a mountain where the bugs were terrible, especially in the bathroom which made me turn around and quickly run out from the swarm of bees and flies, and tried to stay clear of Bears.

The 2 mile trail to the lake was closed, so we drove a bit further and did a half mile hike to a different lake. There was a fork in the path on the way there, and I think we took the wrong path because we say people coming back the other way on our way in, so we turned around and chose the other path. The sign marking the path had arrows pointing to both paths for the way to the lake, but it was confusing. We advised the people trying to go down that path on our way out what we discovered. The lake was serene and quiet, except for our shrieking children.

Then we headed to our campground for the evening. It had lots of fun activities to do—-basketball, horseshoes, large chess, ladder toss, and cornhole. I have always wanted to try ladder toss, and in line with my expectations, I really enjoyed it. I want to get that game for home. It had all the best things from horseshoes with the accessibility that anyone, even C and A found some success. We decided to go out to dinner that night in Bozeman and had pizza. It was a nice break from our traveling food. A woman complimented A on her dress when we were waiting to be seated as she was leaving the restaurant. The kids talked with Grammy on the phone while we waited for our food to come out. The town was really cute, with craftsman style houses just off of the main strip and the main strip had lots of restaurants from local cuisine to choose from.

We had some leftovers, and I had seen a homeless man when we walked in, and since our campsite didn’t have a cooler or any way to keep the food for another meal, I wanted to take the food and give it to someone less advantaged to me. It is getting harder to tell if someone is homeless or a hipster, although the under the surface differences are vast, their underlying garb and body hair are impressively similar.

We got the kid ready for bed, and the site next to ours, which was only a cabin that sleeps five, had at least 10 people, including 4 teenagers, 2 bikes, a golf cart, a truck, an SUV, a Corn hole set, and an incessantly talking set of voices was chattering past bedtime. I was getting worked up while Jill had gone to the shower thinking about the thinks I would like to say, and the best tactics for the conversation. I even went so far as to think Jill would stop by and give them a piece of her mind and they would take it the wrong way and kidnap her or do something violent, so the wait for her to come back from the shower was long, in addition to trying to get the kids settled down for bed.

The people must have gotten the clue, because they calmed down by 10:30ish and we fell asleep shortly after. There wasn’t any air conditioning in the cabin, so we had to leave the windows open until it cooled down. It was sunny and 69 during the day and was cooling down to the lower 50s during the night. It was nice by morning.