Stop 17 (Pt. 1): Yellowstone National Park

We got an early start on our drive to Yellowstone because Woody and Buzz told us it would take 12+ hours to reach the park from Seattle. (We currently have our Waze voice feature set to Toy Story 4 so we're excited to see the movie when we get back home next week.) Andy really wanted to make a pit stop at the headquarters offices of Microsoft and Nintendo USA in Redmond, WA but we just couldn't justify the time it would take to do those things even though they were only slightly off course so we kept driving and he had a sad face. When planning this trip, we knew we'd have to have sacrifice some things in favor of others; it doesn't always feel good when it happens, though.

Andy drove until lunch when we stopped around the Spokane area at a Best Buy for more memory cards and dongles. Andy can't walk well these days because of the pinched nerve in his back but he won't let anything stop him from going into a Best Buy. HA! We switched drivers and he sat in the back to work and sleep while Sarah and I took the windshield views for the next 6 or so hours. On most trips, Andy does the bulk of the driving and I'm thankful for this. I don't like driving up and down large, curvy hills, so it serves me right that I took over in time for us to navigate mountains. Actual. Large-scale. Real. Time. Mountains. I maintained my speed and watched the curves and did just fine. And I drove the entire tank of gas from F to E. But by the time I peeled myself from that driver's seat, my hands were creaking and my hips were numb. I store my driving stress and anxiety in these two areas, and I was feeling some serious joint pain at that gas station in Who-Knows-Where, Montana.

Now, I will say: it was a GORGEOUS drive. Lush, green mountains with flowing streams that cried out for a fly fisherman. Sarah didn't understand my fly fishing reference but I saw so many gorgeous vignettes that would have been made only more perfect had a fly fisherman been wading in the crystal clear waters. She thought I was crazy to even come up with such a thought--but later in the day when Andy has resumed driving, he pulled over to take a photo of one of these gorgeous views and guess what he saw??! Not one, but TWO fly fishermen, in the exact scenario I'd been telling Sarah about for several hours.

Fly fishermen!

The kids do pretty well in the car. Sarah likes sleeping and listening to music on her earbuds. Charlotte and Alex love and hate sitting next to one another in the car. They have a blast playing together and watching movies together. They laugh and joke around. It's hilarious. Until it's not. They bicker, whine, and argue until we're all ready to scream. Charlotte decided to use our line with Alex and made a sign to indicate that she was "closed". We all thought it was funny. Everyone, that is, except Alex.

It was back to Andy's turn to drive again when Woody and Buzz told us we had only a couple of hours left. (Well, it looked like only a couple of hours--we'd long been without a phone signal so our ETA wasn't available to us; we guessed based on mileage.) We pulled into Yellowstone National Park around 10:00PM and proceeded to where Waze said we could find our Lodge. Thirty minutes later, we were at a lodge...but not ours. The man at the front desk gave me a map and showed me how to get to Canyon Lodge, we were at Old Faithful Inn. We had made wrong turn off the main road. That doesn't sound so bad until you realize that Yellowstone is 4,500 square miles big and we'd just driven more than a half hour to find this Lodge. Now we'd have to backtrack, in the darkest dark we'd ever experienced, through silhouettes of steaming geysers, thick wafts of fog, and winding roads with nothing to see for miles. With no other option, we circled around and started our journey back. We were so tired from nearly 15 hours on the road that we just wanted to find our cabin and be done. Canyon Lodge did eventually appear in front of our van and we settled into our freezing cabin #46. The outside temperature was 30 DEGREES and the cabins are individually climate controlled so ours had been left OFF until we arrived. YIKES! Nevertheless, the room was spacious with two queen beds and enough room for the air mattress. 

We set about getting ready for bed while Sarah and Andy went back out to look at stars. Since the stargazing at Bryce Canyon didn't go exactly as planned, Sarah was happy to look at stars here, even in the freezing temps. It was SO, SO, SO dark and she could see the bands of space dust in the Milky Way as well as other spacey stuff I know nothing about. Alex and Charlotte fell asleep while they were gone and I got everything ready for their return (clipping the blinds closed, changing my clothes, charging phones, writing the blog, etc.). And the lights went out on our first, dark Yellowstone day.