Saturday July 7, 2012

We woke up in the cold again.  There seems to be a pattern to the days – cold evenings, nights, and mornings and hot days.  We had a quick breakfast of cereal and bagels with hot cocoa and made lunches to take with us.  We drove north to Mud Volcano and saw some amazing features.  I liked the Dragon’s Mouth the best.  There was lots of steam coming out of a cave opening and you could hear the sound as the hot water and steam being pushed from below.  Collectively, our least favorite feature was Dragon’s Breath.  The stench was horrific!  We all agreed that the dragon needed to use Listerine or Scope!  Our next stop was at the upper falls on the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone.  We walked down the trail until we were standing below one set of falls and over the next.  It was awesome.  We got caught in a huge traffic jam caused by a small herd of buffalo that were walking down the road.  Eventually, they caught up to our car and we had a great view of them as they passed by.  The lead car on the other side was following the buffalo way too closely and seemed to be almost pushing them along.  We were all holding our breath as we thought one of the larger males was going to charge his car (and he might have deserved it from his ignorant behavior)!  He got by safely, however, and we were able to drive ahead.  We drove up to Mammoth Hot Springs and arrived there about noon.  The sign said that it could take up to two hours to tour the site so we decided to eat lunch.  There were no picnic tales nearby so we ate in the truck.  The boys loved the enormity of the hot springs and features here and we spent quite a bit of time walking on the boardwalks around the site.  We decided to drive the boys through the north gate of Yellowstone so they could say they had been in Montana.  On the way we passed a small herd of elk and took some pictures.  We stopped in Gardiner, Montana (the town on the border) to see if we could find wifi service, but didn’t have any luck.  We came back through Mammoth Hot Springs and made out way back to camp, stopping at the store in Fishing Bridge to pick up some ice for the cooler.  We plan to try the 6:00 ranger program (geared for children) tonight.  Oops!  It just started raining so we are sitting in the truck to finish our journals.  We took a vote and the consensus is that we would have chicken for dinner tonight – I hope we don’t have to cook in the rain!  Okay, call me a sissy, but it was still raining at 6 so we didn’t make the ranger program and it didn’t look as if it were going to stop raining any time soon – so . . . back to the diner at Fishing Bridge for dinner.  By the time we got back to camp, the rain had stopped so we built a fire and the boys had s’mores and I read several chapters of our book to them before bed.