Driving a long way to see a geyser

7-22-07

You’ve probably figured this out by now, but I’m writing this from home in sunny California (although it’s actually overcast, and I’m not going to complain about that in Sacramento in July especially since we have to clean out the RV today). I haven’t had a lot of time to write because we’ve been driving too much the last couple of days. Even though we’re home, I want to finish the blog for the last couple days of the trip. I’ve come this far, right?

Anyway, I got up at 5:30 this morning (I’m pretending it’s two days ago), and we were on the road by 6:30. We had looked at the atlas and had briefly considered going the shortest-distance route from South Dakota, but then we realized that going south down to Cheyenne or into Colorado and Utah would take us through the most difficult part of the Rockies, and one thing that we have learned about our old RV is that it’s not a great climber. So we stuck to original plan and drove to Yellowstone Park, except we drove straight there instead of stopping for the night when we got close. We had to cross the Big Horn mountain range, and while it wasn’t easy for our valiant RV, but we made it across.

We spent three or four hours in Yellowstone as opposed to the two days that we had planned, but we still saw quite a bit. We basically drove from the east entrance along the bottom part of the main loop and out the west entrance. We saw a bear way off in the distance and several buffalo, elk, dear, etc. fairly close up. One of the buffalo was even walking on the street right next to the RV. Katie looked out the window, pointed and said, “Doggie.” We even saw a couple of bald eagles on the way out of the park. We stopped briefly a couple of times to look at some of the animals, but the only time we stopped for an extended period was about 45 minutes to wait to see Old Faithful erupt.

When we left the park, we drove until about 11:00. I slept about four hours behind a closed gas station in a little town in Idaho and then got back on the road again as the rest of the gang slept in back of the RV.