Yellowstone

This post is pretty picture heavy, so I won't bore you with too much text up front. We road tripped up to Yellowstone last week and had a great time. We drove up through Idaho so we could see my Grandma in Preston (hope you're reading this now Grandma). We were going to have dinner with her, but I guess 6:30 is a little late for a meal once you're old enough to be my Grandma. Anyway, we saw her for a bit then drove on and stopped for the night at Montpelier. We thought about staying at this place:


(yes, it's an empty lot with a motel sign) but then we decided we should probably upgrade to a place with walls. On our way out of town, we saw a pretty cool tribute to the original settlers of the area:

And another one to the current residents of the area:

A couple hours through twisty mountain roads took us to Jackson. We would have been there sooner but we had to detour when half a mountain fell on the road on the path we were planning to take. Silly landslides. Anyway, got to Jackson and played around at the park in the old town square. The kids loved the antler arches.

We checked out the shops, which have gone from old school to trendy to cash in on the high end tourism that seems to be Jackson's new thing (they don't even call it Jackson Hole anymore, sellouts), had some lunch, then headed to the cabin in Teton Village where we lived for the rest of the trip. The next morning we took a quick stop in Jackson to see the antler auction:

Then we headed up to Yellowstone where we saw all sorts of good things

like Old Faithful, where we had a picnic lunch near the old store.

We saw bubbling paint pots.


And the mud volcano.

Eve loved the way that one smelled. We saw some really cool waterfalls.

And some hot springs.

And some more geysers.

And a couple of frozen lakes.

And lots of great outdoors scenery.

We took some walks.

And played with cousins.

We saw some cool wildlife, a fox, a coyote, loads of buffalo, a moose with her baby mosling, elk, deer, squirrels, chipmunks, and we even saw a bear.

In case you wanted to know what people looking at a bear look like:

The kids just had a ball playing together

Even the stubby ones.

All in all it was a super fun trip.