Relaxing as fast as we can

True to what we call the Jacobson way of doing things, we condensed two days of travel into one long day of driving then turned around and spent our first day in Yellowstone on a 12 hour “Yellowstone in a Day” tour. Obviously it’s going to take some time for us to get the hang of relaxing.

Even as we whizzed across three states we managed to see some of the scenery. Instead of being flat like Russ expected, western Montana has gorgeous mountains with valleys dotted by small pocket towns from the old mining days and with highways running alongside rushing streams from the snowmelt . We drove by several beautifully designed old abandoned power transformer stations that were built when they first brought electricity into rural areas.

We’re staying at an RV park in Gardiner, Montana where we can see the Northern entrance gate to Yellowstone from our spot. According to the guide on our whirlwind tour yesterday, we were unusually lucky in the amount of wildlife we saw especially that we saw a bison actually being born. During the rest of the tour we also saw elk with their calves, a mama grizzly with two cubs, a black bear, a fox,  bison herds and pronghorns. Of course we saw Old Faithful—doesn’t every tourist who goes to Yellowstone?--but we were even more impressed by Artist  Point overlooking the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone and the various sites with thermal activity. I was blown away by seeing that one single park has so many unique geological features: mudpots, geysers, canyons, mountains, hot springs.  During our tour through the park Russ spotted several Homo Sapien Dumbasses who were oblivious to their surroundings as they stopped in the middle of Yellowstone’s narrow roads, shutting down traffic in both directions.  Russ says he’s sure that the Dumbass species is in no danger of becoming extinct.

Now that we’ve seen a little of a lot of Yellowstone we’re planning what parts of the park we’ll be exploring in more depth during the rest of our stay here.