Yellowstone Vacation

Back from vacation, and I currently have over 300 digital photos to sort and organize, so I can order prints! Yellowstone is amazing, awesome, incredible, beautiful, and fascinating!

We saw snow-capped mountains.

We saw geysers and molten, bubbling mud.

We saw craters filled with brilliant blue water, emitting clouds of steam that smelled like rotten eggs (we blamed the smell on my son, accusing him of farting too much in public places.)

We saw Lake Yellowstone, which, to desert dwellers such as ourselves, looked like the ocean, it was so big!

We saw waterfalls and canyons.

And, of course, we saw animals!

Elk!

Bison!

And (my favorite part of the whole trip) a Mama Grizzly Bear with her two little cubbies--a mere 5 yards from the side of the road!

We took these photos from INSIDE the car, keeping a respectful distance! When Mama Bear noticed the "Paparrazzi," she quickly retreated for the hills! So, we had to take a picture of her backside, and no, Mama Grizzly Bear, that outfit does NOT make your butt look big. You are perfect just the way you are! (And your babies are ADORABLE!)

We also saw a moose, and two bald eagles sitting in their nest near the West Entrance, but those pictures are on my daughter's camera, and I haven't uploaded them to my computer yet.

We got snowed on, missed Old Faithful (who chose NOT to perform on schedule, and we got bored--and cold and wet, since it was SNOWING--so we chose not to wait around anymore, and we dissed him.) We also trashed our rental car--seriously! In a mere Six Days my kids got it as dirty and full of trash as my 6-year-old Toyota! I spent entirely too much money on souvenirs--I kept thinking that this might be my only chance to visit Yellowstone, so I needed a T-shirt...and a hat...and a bumper sticker...and some magnets...and a water bottle...

We discovered that Idaho is full of potato farms (miles and M.I.L.E.S of potato farms), and that Jackson Hole, WY is EXACTLY like Santa Fe, only "whiter" and lacking cultural/historical sensitivity and integrity. I drove the Teton Pass not once, but FOUR times, with white knuckles the entire way (NOT a fan of 10% grades on narrow mountain roads with sheer cliffs on one side, no guardrail, and hairpin curves.) We invented new "games to play in the car," like a new version of "Slug-a-Bug" involving punching the person next to you every time you spotted an LDS church while driving through Southern Idaho and Northern Utah (ha ha--aren't we funny and full of religious intolerance!) We also amused ourselves during the long drives in and out and around the park by tuning in to comedy stations on Syrius Satellite Radio. I believe we can recite the stand-up routines of George Lopez, Bill Cosby, Jerry Seinfeld, Jeff Foxworthy, Larry the Cable Guy, and Bill Engvall by heart.

Yellowstone is full of people who are not Americans. I think we were the only Americans present last week, or at least we were the only ones speaking English without an accent! Yellowstone is also full of men sporting ridiculously large and expensive camera equipment. Every time I passed a middle-aged man on a trail sporting a zoom lens the size of a Civil War-era cannon, I thought to myself, "compensating for something?" Ha ha ha!

As I was "reflecting" on this vacation--my first "real" vacation with my kids in 10 years--I realized that this is also probably the first time since I was on maternity leave that I have spent 24 uninterrupted hours a day with my kids for more than 5 days in a row.

About two hours after we returned home, I drove them over to their father's house and dropped them off for the rest of the week because we were sick of each other.

Oh, just kidding--it wasn't because I wanted to, it's just that I had to go into the office in the morning, and they are on summer break and wanted to stay up late and sleep in. But it makes for a funny joke, right?

Wow! These things called "Vacations"? I think I like them! Must take more!