Out West ~ Day 9, Yellowstone

Since our “cheap” motel didn’t have a continental breakfast, we checked out and drove to nearby Teton Village for breakfast at The Mangy Moose. In one of the gift shops in the village, Barbara picked up a brochure describing an iPhone application that provided a virtual tour of Yellowstone National Park. It seemed to be just what we needed, but I needed to download the “app,” and needed a Wi-Fi source.

Had I kept my ID-card for the Wi-Fi I had purchased at the “cheap” motel, I could have used it, but I remembered that McDonalds restaurants all have Wi-Fi. It didn’t take long to locate the nearest McDonalds and obtain the password to access their network. After my online purchase, I discovered the download to my iPhone was too large and that I needed to first download the “app” to my computer. I became rather frustrated with the whole process, as I had only had the iPhone about ten days and was still learning the basics, but after thirty minutes or so I managed to get everything working.

As we were leaving, Barbara asked if the man seated at a bistro table outside wasn’t the same man from Massachusetts she had seen me talking to at our motel. It was, so Barbara and I introduced ourselves to his wife. They had been visiting Yellowstone for the past three weeks and had lodged or camped in the park for most of their visit. Of course, they had seen much more of the park than we could possibly see in the half-day we planned to be there, but they did tell us to watch for cars stopped on the roadside and groups of people standing or walking, as this normally signaled wildlife sightings.

Our drive of two hours plus, to Yellowstone would take us through the Grand Teton National Park, also. The iPhone “app” was wonderful. The feature we used the most was called, Follow Me, which used GPS technology, so that as we neared a point of interest, the iPhone would began playing a recording by an expert on the history of the particular point of interest.

We entered the south gate of Yellowstone National Park and made our way to the visitors center at the geyser, Old Faithful. Naturally, we got there just in time to see Old Faithful bubbling down to rest for another seventy or so minutes before erupting again. But, it was largely Old Faithful we came to Yellowstone to see, so we didn’t mind the wait.

Though it was lunch time, we were not particularly hungry, so we treated ourselves to some of the yogurt we had on ice in a cooler in our car. We also perused the gift shops and picked up souvenirs for certain family members.

The weather was picture-perfect, no clouds, very low humidity, and temperatures in the eighties, a welcome change from the hundred-degree heat we had left behind in Mississippi barely a week prior. We sat in full sun waiting on Old Faithful to erupt for the millionth or so time, but we were not uncomfortable at all.

A woman to my right struck up a conversation with me and asked me all sorts of questions about geysers. I did my best to answer them, though the one about what makes Old Faithful erupt with such precise regularity left me struggling to explain. Still our conversations helped pass the time.

Old Faithful did not disappoint us and at full eruption spouted water more than one hundred feet into the air. Barbara captured the eruption on our digital camera as I recorded it on my iPhone.

There were other active geysers in the same basin as Old Faithful and there was an observation point on the side of a mountain opposite our seating area, but we were content seeing Old Faithful and seeing it perhaps fifty yards from us.

We enjoyed our iPhone “tour guide” as we headed toward the East Gate entrance to Yellowstone, though I found it unnerving that Yellowstone Lake is upwards of 400 feet deep, and we drove alongside it for miles and miles. We, also, saw areas of Yellowstone that had been destroyed by wildfires a few years ago.

Upon leaving Yellowstone National Park our destination was Cody, Wyoming. Each night, I programmed our destination for the next day into our GPS, so finding our motel in Cody was a snap. Since a Pizza Inn was adjacent to our motel, we walked over to eat there. The place was packed, due to a Tuesday night buffet special, and noisy. However, about midway through our meal, the crowd started thinning out and we were able to enjoy our own conversation.

Additional pictures and comments at http://rrnews.org/Week2Day9

The video we made of Old Faithful is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGbcegYX2LA