Day 7: Short drive to Beautiful Yellowstone

June 22

Cody is about 50 miles to the east entrance of Yellowstone National Park. With slower traffic, higher elevation and curvy roads it took about 3 hours to get to the West Entrance and stay in the closest town, West Yellowstone, Montana. There are only 2 or 3 campgrounds inside of YNP that you can use a Class A Motorhome and when I looked in April, everything was booked already. Entrance into the park is $25 per vehicle, but the pass is for seven days, rea$onable. Or you can purchase an America the Beautiful annual pass for $80, and it gets you into all the country's parks for 12 months.  We had a chance to really see some of park on this drive in and our first experience with the local wildlife. Yellowstone is soooo big, what are the chance you will see a wild animal close to the street? 

This huge buffalo bull was just grazing on the side of the road with not much of a care in the world, knowing most will gladly get out of his way! We also saw two female elk grazing on the side of the road. Everyone pulls over, stops for pictures.  The park does a good job warning all visitors to NOT approach the animals, stay at least 25 yards away from most, further from buffalo and bears. But you still see those tourist that can't help but get closer. That is why I brought my Nikkor 55-300 mm lens, to stay the heck back! 

Yellowstone Grizzly RV Park was by far the nicest campground we stayed in, all paved, cleaned shower houses (not that we used them), vinyl picnic tables that you can wipe clean and not get splinters, all right in town.  The three small western towns we've spent time in this last week, Custer, SD; Cody, WY; & West Yellowstone, MT, are all authentic, thrive off tourism, but not in a cheesey way. They all have their little tourist shops but very little chain stores, fast food, etc. 

After we ate a quick lunch at the campground, we headed back into the park to see Old Faithful. As we were driving from West Yellowstone to Old Faithful, enjoying the amazing scenes around us, top off the Wrangler, it seemed only fitting that "America the Beautiful" by the Zac Brown Band came on from my itunes.  Old faithful is pretty consistent and blows about every 90 minutes or so give it take ten minutes, and we arrived perfectly 20 minutes before. It's a geyser that shoots boiling water into the air an average 130 feet high. Crazy! 

We walked around the education center and grounds for a bit, then headed back out on the loop towards the other geyser basins between Old Faithful and Madison. 

Why is Jason looking at that river that way? Wishing he'd brought his fishing gear? 

This is Midway geyser Basin. The colors were amazing! Teals and blues that look like they belonged in the Carribean, rich browns

. Don't the clouds just look like you can reach out and touch them? Yeah, we're pretty much that high;)

It was getting late, about 6 p.m. And we headed back to the cool little town of West Yellowstone for dinner. Ate at local BBQ place that was yum! Showers, device time, off to bed, we're all wiped out. 

One cute saying of the day: I told the kids that I thought they have transitioned from houseboat kids to RV kids pretty well, smooth transition water to road....keep themselves busy throughout the day.... Charlie said "I'm still pretty much a boat kid!" Thought Papa would like that one. 

States: Wyoming and Montana