We Got Beehived.

Well, the lack of technology in the vast reaches of Wyoming caught up with me.  Not only am I behind on the blog, but work came to a screeching halt upon arrival in Yellowstone, where use of Wi-Fi and/or cellular connections is considered a sacrilege to the surrounding environment.  People are forced to go on real vacations here.  After a day of panic, I decided there was little I could do to control the lack of connectivity and figured that I shouldn’t be working anyway while trying to move and will simply do what I can.  Yeah…I’ll let you know how that goes with my personality.

So arrival in Yellowstone started with Old Faithful herself, who blew her cap at 1136 precisely.  While I found it neat, I have learned that the unexpected belching of random geysers is far more exciting.  Old Faithful is, well, faithful, she’ll give you a show, but when we walked past Beehive Geyser, who isn’t supposed to blow her cork but every 10 hours- 5 days, we got drenched with her love.  We have a friend that has come twice to Yellowstone and stalked Beehive with the opportunity to see her 100-200 foot geyser, with no such luck.  Hopefully, the pictures of the Beehive erupting at the same time as Old Faithful erupted in the background (this time at 1311) survived the camera’s drenching with mineral water.  We on the other hand, have such great luck to be showered.  The kids were not cool with this, while the Sailor and I giggled like school children.  The camera got nailed and we are not sure how much longer it will last.  So far, so good.  LMS is such a girl, getting sprinkled just ruined her day.  Thereafter, we heard, “I want to go to the hotel” while we dragged them through one beautiful geyser and spring after another.  The area is mystifying.  I am not sure if I am in a Lord of the Rings movie with so much smoke and shadow surrounding me, or if I feel that I am walking through areas that have been gorged by a nuclear warhead.  The geysers and springs are not hospitable to green/growing things.  The trees that drink the spring water soon get calcified by the mineral deposits and they drop dead like grey skeletons.  It’s at once depressing and awe inspiring.  And the colors created by the microscopic bacteria and critters create rainbows in the earth.  Places like Firehole Falls seem to come out of a Science fiction movie and there is a constant battle between the geysers/springs and those things that want to grow. 

Yellowstone leaves me perplexed.  It has multiple personality disorder as the upper loop and lower loop have little in common.  Except for buffalo and elk.  My kids have buffalo and elk fatigue.  They are like, whoopideedoo now.  It’s like castles in Germany.  After awhile, you’ve see one castle, you’ve seen them all.  Our tally of wildlife includes HERDS of buffalo, elk, a moose, an osprey, 2 black bear cubs, geese, ducks, blue birds, magpies, pronghorn deer, Big horn sheep,  many chipmunks and marmots, one jack rabbit and the Sailor swears he saw a Grizzly and her cubs (if that’s what you can call tiny dots on a distant hill).  We’ve chuckled twice as buffalo have marched down the middle of a lane with LINES of cars behind then with no clue that a buffalo is leading the way.  It’s their park after all.  From our hotel, we have a family of Elks that sit around our cabin and the lodge just showing off.

From Old Faithful, we checked into our cabin (no toilet or shower people) because of the rain—LMS was done with being wet and proceeded to enjoy a phenomenal meal of prime rib, homemade mashed potatoes, warm goat cheese and pine nut salad and a lovely huckleberry crumb cake desert.  YUM.  The Sailor traded World Cup soccer barbs with our water server, who is from England, and told him that we’d be happy with a draw with England and two wins.  One down…

The following day had us hiking from our cabin up through the Mammoth Hot Springs terraces that are a spitting distance from where we are staying.  These suckers are HUGE and awesome and again an incredible testimony to the volatile geological structure of Yellowstone.  Yellowstone was essentially created after a volcano blew its fuse about 2 million years ago, created a lake and left an unstable network of hot springs below the earth’s surface to which results in an ever changing oasis of color, waterfalls, steam, geysers, and springs.  I actually find the sulfur smells kind of cleansing, the kids just think it’s stinky.  The Yellowstone volcano erupted twice more – 1.3 million years ago and 640,000 years ago.  While we’re due another eruption soon, she’s been quiet this week.

As I am typing this on the porch of our cabin, a mother elk and calf just walked by less than 10 yards away.  Well duh.

Lunch was a nasty forage at the local ‘fast food’ place.  Nothing special.  (However, I should note that, except for one Happy Meal for Mr. Hawking as we left St. Louis, we’ve gone over three weeks without eating at a real fast food restaurant.  Take that!)

From there, we headed out for the drive by tour of Lamar valley, which is known for its wildlife viewing.  I have to interject here and discuss bear sightings.  This is a communal event, which is known for a critical mass of people stopping and staring hard into the woods in order to make a bear appear since one individual “swears” they saw one.  There is a core group of photographers and grizzly groupies that hang out at certain places in the park and rangers usually have to come by and do traffic control because people randomly line the roads at haphazard intervals.  This could go on for hours, but my patience does not last that long.  We spotted two baby bears in the trees and that filled my bear frenzy.  Not so much for others.  This goes on all over the place.  If you see a line of cars, pull off, because I am sure there is something to look at.

I won’t deign to speak of the cafeteria we stopped at for dinner.  Barforama.  However, of all the places in this huge place, we did happen to cross paths with the other couple heading from C’ville to Fort Lewis.  Go figure.  The world really is that small.  We also ran across a German couple that we had already chatted with once down in the Tetons, they are spending 8 weeks traveling the US for their vacation.  Sweet.  It makes my day that they aren’t wasting their time on NY, Miami, LA, etc.  Mr. Hawking is so shy but loves meeting new kids, and had the mother translate a few things to their two boys (ages 3 and 6).  When we left, he was upset that we didn’t get their phone number so that he could have had a playdate with them.  This led to 5 minutes of questions about how long it would take to get from Germany to Washington State on an airplane, a jet plane, a car, etc.

After living in Germany for three years, we’re especially attuned to the Germans we see.  We’ve had a couple of good chats with some other Germans.  One couple told us, when we mentioned that we lived in Wuerzburg for three years: “Bayern?”  “Ja,” The Sailor responded.  “That is not Germany, it is northern Italy.”  One other German-meeting didn’t go so well.  When we got to our cabin, Mr. Hawking and LMS unleashed their car-inhibited energies and ran wild in our room. The adjacent room in the cabin (the walls amplify sound next door) was inhabited by a grumpy German  college student, who told me that she didn’t appreciate the gleeful sounds of little children playing.  While I sympathize with her alleged plight (she said she’s slept 3 hours in the previous 3 days), it was just 4:30 in the afternoon!

A dude just walked by with a shirt that said, “Unathletic club, XXXXL.”  The Sailor made me comment.

Today began with a great hike through the Artist’s Paint Pots Geyser basin.  The kids and I have lovingly dubbed this area “tootie geysers.”  These are mud filled geysers that when they go off, sound like a toot (and please, my mother reads this, don’t make me use the un-lady like version of toot).  My daughter, who obviously comes from my husband’s side of the family, is going “toot, phfffft, toot, phfffft, *giggle*, toot, phffffft, toot, *giggle* over and over and over.  We have this on video.  These are seriously the most entertaining geysers that spray mud and do their business.  This is the sort of thing that entertains a 2 and 4 year old.

Mr. Hawking loves our hikes and often runs so far ahead of us that we have to chase him down.  More than one fellow hiker has  commented to us: “I bet he’s never quiet, is he?”  We’ve both realized after spending three weeks straight with no break from the kids in close proximity that this is a correct assumption.  If Mr. Hawking is not asleep, he’s talking.   LMS enjoys hikes too, but for her hiking consists of sitting on daddy’s shoulders or mommy’s shoulders while we cart her around everywhere.  Even bribes of “energy pills” (Skittles) can’t entice her to walk more than a couple minutes at a time.

From there we enjoyed a picnic (of our usual: Lunchables, cheese, bison/antelope sticks, and Pringle’s) at Norris Geyser Basis and a tour of yes, MORE geysers, springs, fumaroles, hot pots and dead trees.  It was lovely.  The afternoon was taken trying to get online in the gateway town of Gardiner—no such luck for work and doing laundry.  Dinner was a Bison Burger with bacon, barbecue, jalapenos and pepper jack cheese.  Need I say more?

The weather has been unseasonably cold: 30s to 50s, which is like January in SC.  It is calling for 3 feet of snow about 9000 feet tonight.  We’ve been blessed that only one day of weather slowed us down.  I am not sure how many people can say they’ve seen as much of Yellowstone as we have in 3.5 days.  We went back a billion times to find the grizzlies again, but no such luck.  We are just groupies now.

We’re off towards Glacier National Park tomorrow.  I’ll be sad to say good bye to Yellowstone, although it kills me to say that I am getting a bit of “grandeur fatigue.”  How much beauty can you see this regularly and get numb?  More seriously, I am getting to where I miss my own bed and packing up the car is tedious and we’ve had numerous meltdowns that show me that it gets to the kids too.  We are getting close.  I think I can taste our new home.  Surely it will come soon.  In the mean time, I am genuinely thankful and blessed to experience God’s good earth and actually slow down enough to enjoy.  Peace.  Although slightly annoyed that I have still not found Elk Medallions.