Day 25: Yellowstone National Park

Well, today started off interesting.  We got all the kids up early and dressed.

Scott is waking up the 2 sleeping princesses!

 Everyone was in the car at 8 a.m.  Scott turned the key and....nothing.  Battery was dead.  Grace and Kendall jump out and yell that they will go to the office and see if they have jumper cables.  In a few minutes here they come with jumper cables in hand AND a dude in a truck driving around to our car.  No need to worry about those two being on their own!

When that didn't work, we had to call AAA.  Their guy came with some charger/jumper thingy (technical description) and within 10 minutes the car was started and the battery charged up!

So even with our delay, we were still off to Yellowstone by 10!

The drive in is beautiful.  The lakes up here are unbelievable.  Scott took this picture of the perfectly mirrored sky in the crystal clear lake.  

Of course, stop #1 was Old Faithful.  We had no idea how often or what time it was gonna go, we just went.  We got out went to the restroom, and then walked toward the viewing area.  We had literally been there less than 5 minutes wondering how long we were gonna have to wait when...

Thomas was way too busy photographing the whole thing for me to get a picture of him!  We timed it just perfectly.  It was awesome.  They have 3 lodges, a general store and a visitor center at the Old Faithful site.  So, we spent some time in the visitor center learning about what makes geysers erupt.  In the kids section they had a giant science experiment replica of Old Faithful that showed the kids exactly how the heat and pressure make it erupt...

While we were waiting on Scott to pay for our purchases, the girls decided to turn on some music and dance.  On the front porch of the very busy Visitor Center...

Yes, that's Mandy on the bench.  Just entertaining the masses wherever we go! 

We then had us a picnic lunch...

After that we decided to drive the big loop around Yellowstone Lake.  The first thing we came upon to stop and check out were the geothermal basins.  These huge areas with all kinds of hot springs, geysers & mineral pools.  It's sometimes a little stinky thanks to the sulfur in the water, but they really are pretty.

 Pretty sure we weren't supposed to be standing that close, but there was no sign...

Everywhere we drove we were looking for wildlife.  We saw several large elk..

And the buffalo, make it easy by walking down the road...

 Kendall was very disappointed that we would not let her get out of the car to pet the 2000 lb. wild buffalo, so she suggested that maybe Mr. Scott could just pull the car up beside it and let her stick her hand out the window instead!  This does not look like a "petting" animal to me!

We stopped at a creek and let them do a little wading...

It was after this fun that Scott got a little heavy footed with his driving and we got pulled over by the park police!  After he wrote Scott a ticket, the kids wanted to have their picture taken with them....

You should have seen their faces when kids just continued to pile out of the car!

The last thing we did was to hike the short path to Moose Falls.  It was so cool!  It's just right there and you can hike right to the water. Again, I say..Who needs Hawaii??  This was much prettier than anything we saw last summer.

By this point everyone was tired so we headed back to Jackson.  You have to drive through Teton National Park to get to Yellowstone.  The Tetons are gorgeous too...

We grabbed a quick dinner in town and then back to the cabin!  Thinking tomorrow we may head to Jenny Lake for a boat ride and some hiking.

Blessings from Yellowstone,

Leslie