Coyotes or Geese (JPB)

Yesterday was the great Yellowstone adventure. Well, as great as it can be when a lot of the park is closed. We hit Mammoth Hot Springs and Old Faithful. Marlene was so excited to see Old Faithful I thought she was going to jump out of her skin (too bad you can't read sarcasm in a blog....). In her defense, she was tired and hungry and was pretty impressed when it finally blew. There were lots of bison this time around, many with small calves. We were in several bison traffic jams, partly caused by bison in the road, partly caused by people only sort of pulling over to observe the bison. It was pretty fun to navigate your car through a herd of wild(ish) animals though. One of them even gave us a live show of the bowel system of the American buffalo (Bison bison). His demonstration ended right on the double yellow dividing line line of the road. Always fun, and I'm sure the 7 year old kids in the car in front of us were way more mature about the whole situation that I was. Some things are still just funny to me. In terms of other wild life we saw elk, 1 bald eagle (in a nest), and Marlene saw what she thought was either a coyote or some geese. Guess the jury is still out on that one.

After Yellowstone, we stopped in West Yellowstone for a pizza then headed out to Idaho Falls. I think you would have to really really like snow to live in West Yellowstone, or up on the mountains in Idaho. It's now May and there are still SEVERAL FEET of snow on the sides of the road. It looked like February. No leaves on the trees. Just snow. After losing altitude at a 6% grade for 4.5 miles we came down into potato country. There's nothing notable about the Rexberg/Idaho Falls area. Now we're going to lit out for Reno (won't be trailed by 20 hounds though, plus I got some sleep last night before the morning came around, so it's not like the song).