National Parks, Here We Come!

We had no sooner gone through the gate of Rocky Mountain National Park, than we saw some elk in a meadow. We're thinking they were tethered there for the tourists. Well maybe not...

As we were driving there, traffic stopped. I figured - bear on the road or something, right? Once we were stopped for a while, moving in fits and starts, we figured it wasn't that. As it turned out, Estes Park, Colorado has Scottish Days annually and it backed up traffic for 6 miles going into town.

We hadn't made any motel reservations, figuring it was pretty much off-season after Labor Day. Wrong. Every old person in the nation waits until after Labor Day to vacation, it seemed. (I know we were there) We had to search hard to find a room several days. Wednesday night we stayed in Rapid City. We decided to try a Microtel there and try to pay under $80, since we had been paying over $100. The guy at the desk said they didn't have any single rooms left except one with a hot tub, so he gave us that room for $73. Fun! We soaked.

The road out of RMNP was a beautiful drive through steep rock canyons. It was gorgeous and we didn't take picture one. Bubkis. Nada. Just take my word for it, really, really pretty.
Yellowstone Park is just awesome! No other word for it . Really other-worldly. This picture is of one of the many hot pools and the color was just that, a lovely turqouois.

This picture shows the road hanging out over thin air. We said a lot of "Oh, man!" "Oh, crap!" "Oh, God!" "Oh, no!" as we wound our way up and up and up and looked down and down and down.

Marv and I were taking pictures of each other when a young couple offered to take one of the both of us. I kiddingly told them then would have to give us their car keys to hold before I would hand over our camera to them. Later I mused that our camera would be a cheap price to pay for their Honda Element, if we were untrustworthy.

We took 5 pictures of Old Faithful and they all looked like this. The lens didn't open. Wasn't very faithful, was it?

There were signs all over to be cautious of the bears. Yeah right. There are NO bears in Yellowstone Park, or if there are they are all busy s#!$$ing in the woods. Therefore, I took a picture of the woods, figuring there was a bear in there somewhere. I had this vision of all these bears coming out of the woods after our car passed. Marv bought me necklace... a bear claw set in silver with a couple stones of turquois. It was as close as we got to a bear.

Bison, they had. Lots of bison. They're huge and they travel wherever they darnwell please.

Pretty picture

We took David Digby's GPS with us. It has a big screen and "Emily" told us where to turn. These mountain roads wound back and forth on the screen on top of each other, all most. It was wild.

It was all great fun. I was kinda tired and about to fall asleep in the car one day (I do that a lot) but couldn't picture myself sleeping through Yellowstone. I really is beautiful and makes Iowa cornfields pale in comparison. It was still wonderful to be home, though.