Yellowstone

No, we didn't go there during Christmas vacation. Remember, I said I am catching up on my blog. This is another catching up post. We stopped here on our way home from the West coast. We just couldn't go through Nebraska again. No offense to those that live there and love the state but it doesn't have much change of scenery. The kids and I had never been to Yellowstone so we decided to do something new on the way home.

We were traveling in the middle of October and we knew that the weather could be iffy. We spent the night in West Yellowstone staying at Holiday Inn. We were tired after driving from Spokane and our room was next to a group of noisy people so before we even unpacked we said something to the front desk and they moved us to the family suite -- nice -- three beds, two rooms and very quiet. The next morning we got up, ate breakfast at McDonalds, saw some Chinese students and met a couple that teach English in China. Then we headed into the park. We decided that we could stay until about 3:00 as we still had some driving to do that day.

We were excited to go.  The weather was beautiful and the part was not too crowded. We wondered what animals we would see. It didn't take long. He was right there munching his breakfast. The kids were excited to see this. The kids had a page to fill out with the various animals that we saw.



 

We decided to go up toward Mammoth Hot Springs first. We made a number of stops along the way. We were excited and stopped at all kinds of things that looked interesting.



We spent quite a bit of time walking around Norris Hot Springs.



We decided not to go all the way to Mammoth Hot Springs but we did stop at Fountain Paint Pots and enjoyed watching and listening to the mud pots.



Then we headed to Old Faithful. Along the way we saw a herd of buffalo so we had to stop and take some pictures.



The visitor center at Old Faithful was nice. We enjoyed walking through there and learning various things. The advantage of being there in October was parking was not a problem.



Miss K said she was a scientist. She was very intent on studying that rock.



We got excellent seating and waited for Old Faithful. It was fun to just sit and watch it slowly begin and then get so tall.



We then began our journey out of the park. We were sad that we hadn't seen any bears but you can't see everything. We did learn that if you saw cars pulled over to the side of the road that probably means there is something to look at. As we were driving out. We saw cars pulled over and so we pulled over and way in a distance we were able to see



a bear. We saw a bear. That is about the best picture that we got but we did see it.

We only had a day but we had great weather and it was not that crowded so we were able to see quite a bit of the park. We did drive quite a distance that evening and some of them were windy roads at high elevation. Maybe it was good that it was dark. Our stop was worth it. We have fun memories and good pictures.