jellostone

We are on our way back to California and stopped in Idaho Falls.

The big debate - get home or spend a day in Yellowstone National Park.

Yellowstone - or as Cade puts it, Jellostone, won.

Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.

I decided I was no longer going to take picture from inside the car, through the window, because the pictures do not do any of the beauty justice.

So you really just need to go there yourself for the gorgeous drive through.

This was my favorite:

Yes, it does say "bacteria mat".  Okay, maybe not everything was beautiful, but almost.

Walking up to this next place was an interesting experience.

The wind would blow the hot steam from the pools and we'd get blasted with super hot, humid wind.

Then for a few seconds the regular breeze would blow and it would cool us off - but barely in time for the next blast.

 Lucy is (almost) always ready for a pose.

 Finally we got to Old Faithful and just about 15 minutes before the next projected eruption.

So we sat and waited.

 With just a few other people.  To our right...

 And left....

 Old Faithful was almost Unfaithful.

We started, under Maddy's charge, calling it Old Faithless as we were well beyond 5 minutes beyond the estimate.  We thought we might be part of the first crowd to experience Old Faithful being not quite that.

It started to sputter and spit so we jokingly said that was it and laughed about how we should just leave.

Many jokes were going back and forth between all of us (and Lucy said we were just being sarcastic.... good to know she is finally recognizing it!).  At least we got the neighbors on the right chuckling.

Lucy got a little frustrated waiting.

I told her that she better be patient because she wasn't going to be back to Yellowstone until her honeymoon or after.  The lady next to me laughed.  At least she thought I was funny.

But finally, alas, it was Faithful.

The height didn't last more than about 30 seconds, but it was cool while it did.

 Did you know there are only 940 geysers in the whole world and over 500 of them are in Yellowstone?

Yup, it's true.

We learned that from Ranger Joe - or who ever he was.

He was rather entertaining.

 After Yellowstone, we stopped for Moose Tracks ice cream in West Yellowstone.

We're such good parents that we didn't have to wait for our kids to scream, because we stopped before Dairy Queen.

 A very big part of our Yellowstone experience was this:

 We found all but 7 license plates.... we were pretty excited about that.

I had suggested driving around in the Old Faithful parking lot.  I'm pretty sure we would have had them all then.  I'm pretty sure we made the right move by not doing it, but it still would have been cool.

Tomorrow we are on the road again - two more days till Cali.