Yellowstone

 

The next morning we turned in our cabin key and said goodbye to Nevada City, then started the short drive to West Yellowstone. As we drove into the canyon we could see a large foggy cloud rolling it's way over the mountain tops and spilling out into the valley. I had never seen anything quite like it. By the time we came to Quake Lake we were in a beautiful foggy wonderland. We grabbed some breakfast at West Yellowstone and headed into the park. I told the kids to keep their eyes open for all kinds of animals and Ava asked me if the animals would be by the slides and monkey bars too... maybe the word "park" was a bit miss leading.:)

 Just inside the park we hit a horrible traffic jam...all because of these little guys....cute, but a 30 minute delay?! We were afraid the entire park would be jam packed but it wasn't too bad, except Old Faithful...that place is always faithfully packed.

So so beautiful!

 Notice how in the Old Faithful pictures neither Ava or Luke are actually looking at the geyser...no they are far to busy staring at the guy down the walkway from us who just spilled his drink and is swearing and yelling about it.  And there's me, "Ava! Luke! Look guys it's going off! Wow, isn't that so cool! Ava! Luke! Look at it!" Maybe if we hadn't driven around and around the parking lot looking for a parking spot we might have gotten a better view up closer by those other people and away from drink guy.
 Jeremy finally gave up and just dumped the kids and I off, so we wouldn't miss it erupting then have to wait forever for the next one. On our walk back to find Jeremy, Luke starts to cry saying that he wanted to watch Old Faithful with Daddy. (I guess I'm just not as fun as Daddy.) As it turned out Jeremy had found a parking spot right after dropping us off and got to watch it after all. So we met up with him and thought we'd enjoy a little walk together around the boardwalks behind Old Faithful, something I never remember doing before. And we just happened to be there when Castle geyser erupted. It lasted for about 40mins and goes off around 3-5pm every day, we were there about 4ish. Luke was so excited, he just couldn't believe our good fortune to be there at the exact time it went off!

I loved this view of Old Faithful Inn. One of these days I am going to spend the night there.:)

 Our last stop of the day was the lake. We could have spent an entire day just playing around on the beach.

 Done with a few pictures and they're out of there!

Ruthy enjoyed playing in the sand and eating the sand. She also pooped sand for the next few days.

 

We said goodbye to beautiful Yellowstone and headed over to Cody for dinner and then it was on to Byron.