Road Trip Day Five: Yellowstone

This was our one full day in Yellowstone. We drove around the lower loop, making stops at the waterfalls, sulfur pots, mud volcano, and Old Faithful. We did lots of little hikes here and there. Ben and Emily were troopers about all of the walking. Elise and Abby weren’t quite so happy about it. Hopefully they’ll get better over the next few years.








We had lunch at a little picnic area right on the bank of the Yellowstone River, and got a close-up view of a stellar jay (that we accidentally fed when the wind blew over Elise’s lunch plate). In fact, most of our (non-bison) wildlife sightings for the day were of birds. In addition to the jay we saw lots of geese (and one gosling), a great blue heron, and some ravens.




Our most exciting sighting of the day was a wolf. Road trip lesson of the day: Have a camera easily accessible at all times. By the time I got the camera ready, Mr. Wolf was heading toward the trees. I had a hard time zooming in and keeping him in the frame. So, the best I got was a picture of the trees that he had just run through. I was bummed I didn’t get a picture for the kids since Emily was the only one who saw it in real life.

We lucked out and got to Old Faithful just in time for the eruption. The kids thought it was pretty neat. Since it was still early in the day, we decided to stick around and watch it again. We were going to walk up to some of the pools to pass the time, but there was a herd of buffalo hanging out on the path. Instead, we checked out the visitor center and watched a movie about all of the geothermal features in Yellowstone.




It was a good day in the park. We got back to the hotel fairly early and headed to the hot tubs. We were hoping to beat the rush and have the place to ourselves, but instead we got to hang out with some bikers from Alberta and a high school motocross kid. We had chicken pot pies for dinner and watched some more Man vs. Food and an episode of Wipeout. It was a nice, relaxing night.