Yellowstone, Part I

 On Friday, John flew off to Chicago for a music gig, and Stace flew into Billings in the evening. Genia and I loaded the kids into the car, picked him up, and off we drove to Gardiner, MT, for a brief adventure in America's first national park. After all, we couldn't visit Montana in the summer and NOT go to Yellowstone.

Here was the view from our hotel room! Just gorgeous.

The children all had so much fun staying in a hotel together (in rooms next door to each other). Violet and Owen marveled that we had a microwave and mini-fridge, which Johnny painstakingly filled with our snacks for Saturday's adventure.

They happily played on the grass, and in the morning, we spotted a marmot in the rocks near the river. The kids were all sad to leave the hotel Saturday morning. But we had places to go, and wonders to see.

Soon after entering the park, near the Mammoth Hot Springs area, we saw a group of elk. Some were very young; there were about 30 altogether.

Here, we stopped at the ranger station to get Yellowstone Junior Ranger guides, so our five junior rangers-in-training could complete the learning activities and earn their badges.

Mammoth Hot Springs was an amazing place to see (and smell) - boiling pools, colored water, and sulfur. We warned the children about straying from the wooden walkways - people and animals actually die every year by falling through thin ground into scalding steamy pools of mud.

Our next stop was the Artist Paint Pots area, where you can see many pools of different colored water, with the various colors showing how hot the water is. The blue water is 198 (92 C) degrees!

On our daylong driving adventure, we spied several lone bison, like this one here. We also came across several groups of cars stopped on the roadside, with people out with cameras and binoculars, apparently looking at grizzly or black bears. At one point, Ave said she saw one, though she was the only one in our car to be so lucky.

It was a l-o-n-g day of driving for the children: we started at 8 and didn't get back to Billings until nearly 11 p.m. For the most part, they did well, and spent several hours in the beginning looking through their junior guidebooks.

They also entertained us all with singing. Enjoy this video - we sure enjoyed it while it was live. Maroon 5's "Moves Like Jagger" is a big hit, thanks to the Wii Just Dance video game.