Old Faithful. Join Jill and Andrew and...

Today was another awesome day in Yellowstone.

After the late dinner in Hayden Valley last night we got back to our camp site pretty late. But the girls were already tucked in and asleep for about the last 90 minutes of the drive back, so not too bad for them.

It got pretty funny early this morning. We set our alarm to get an early start over to Old Faithful. Alarm went off around 6:45, we got up, threw on some clothes and were on the road about 7:00. The girls kept sleeping the entire drive over to Old Faithful , a little more than an hour . Maybe you had to be there, but I was cracking up when they woke up with no clue where they were or even what day it was. Did you know that Yellowstone contains 60% of all of the planet's geysers?

We saw Old Faithful erupt around 9 AM, then found Jill and Andrew White and their two children Madeline and George over at the Old Faithful Inn (click for more on the 100+ year old iconic national park lodge). We'd been planning to meet them, but with no cell phone service we were happy to finally meet up. After a nice, but slow, breakfast at the hotel we went back out for round two with Old faithful then hit the road on the way to a gentle hike for the whole gang.

We stopped for lunch at a non-descript picnic site along the way and as we were about to pack up to go Andrews sister-in-law came running over. They had been picnicing about 50 feet away. Neither Andrew or his brother knew the other was going to be in Yellowstone, so this was a pretty amazing event (they both live in Virginia, Yellowstone is a 2.2 million acre national park well over a thousand miles from their home, and we stopped at some random picnic area with no particular attraction to it, so almost spooky).

We had a fair amount of rain so did a lot of driving, saw another beautiful hotel (the Lake Yellowstone Lodge) and stopped there for some coffee. We saw a moose on the way and that was pretty cool.

From there we took the kids to a ranger talk about the bald eagle at Fishing Bridge and that was very interesting (I was proud of Kirsten's knowledge of the selection of the Bald Eagle as the national symbol. Kirsten informed the group that Ben Franklin was against it, since it's primarily a scavenger, and instead favored the wild turkey. Now you know, too.)

Hot dogs on the drive back tonight, the kids are tucked in, I'm picking up the laundry at the launderette here at the campground (julie did it all, I'm just picking it up so I could get on the Internet.)

Off to Grand Teton tomorrow and hopefully I'll have some time to write some more and get more pictures up. These first posts were all rushed and I'm trying to get back to home, tin home for some shut eye.

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