Yellowstone

Up at 4am and on the road by 5am

Destination Big Sky, Montana

Our first day of vacation was just a driving day.  I had packed snacks and lunch so apart from toilet breaks we really didn't stop.

Montana's scenery is gorgeous. Green rolling hills, grazing cattle and then you head into the Rocky Mountains and the scenery steps it up 1,000%.

Lush green pine trees and aspen birch flank the many rivers and creeks.  We saw many fly fishermen standing in the cold river patiently waiting to hook a fish.

Lone Mountain

For the next couple of nights we were kindly invited to stay with the H's at their family cabin.  It really worked out timing wise because not only were we and the H's in Montana at the same time, another family, the Bechtolds, were also travelling in the same direction as us (actually for a few days it seemed like we were following the Bechtold's, just a lucky coincident) so for a night we were all together.  Ailish was especially excited by this because that meant she and Kailey would unofficially get to have their first sleepover together.

Over the next 2 days we drove around Yellowstone.  The road in Yellowstone pretty much divides it into two parts...the North Loop and the South Loop.

We drove the South Loop on the first day and then worked our way around the North Loop the second day.

The South part of Yellowstone was my favourite.  It's greener and more lush which means there is more chance for animal sightings.....which also means the traffic pretty much comes to a stand still, but what a place to be stuck in traffic!

Yellowstone is a ginormous, inactive volcano, so throughout many areas of the park there are geysers that bubble to the earths surface.  There are a number of large geysers that you can walk around, but you'll also see many small geysers just steaming away throughout the park.

Fountain Paint Pot

Grand Prismatic Spring

These geysers are so vibrantly colourful.  Can you imagine seeing these from above, the aerial view must be even more spectacular.

Not much grows close to these geysers.  The volcanic gases and minerals just aren't the ideal nutrient source for any plants.

I guess the most famous of all the geysers is Old Faithful.  It erupts at regular intervals.  I don't know how the Park Rangers work it out but they're pretty correct, give or take a few minutes.  We arrived within half an hour of it's next eruption, so we sat and waited.....

And waited......

Until finally......

Quick, quick, get in the photo!

It's quite impossible to see everything in Yellowstone, and if you stopped every time you saw some nice scenery you just wouldn't get very far.  So often I just had to point my camera out of the car window and snap a few pics, hoping to capture the memory.

A big part of our Yellowstone experience was animal spotting, and animal spotting was the major cause of cars either stopped in the middle of the road or going at a snails pace to catch a glimpse of whatever it was.

It was a real treat to spot animals that we had never seen before and only read about or seen on TV.  And what made these sightings even more magical is that we spotted them all in the wild, going about their normal activities.  The park rangers were pretty good at keeping people at a safe distance, both for our protection and the animals.

Goodbye Yellowstone, it was a real treat.

Next stop..........