Thank goodness for 64GB memory cards...

This will probably completely shock you, but we woke up at around 5:30am to get ready and get the car packed. I wheeled our luggage cart out to the front of the hotel and started loading the car quickly. Was this my eagerness at getting to Yellowstone? Was this my attempt to show off in front of my wife? No, folks, I got the luggage off the luggage cart as quickly as I could because I didn't want someone coming up to me and asking how many nights we stayed in town. It would have been embarrassing to say anything less than two weeks based on the luggage we had on the cart, and we were only there one night. At this point, I'm pretty sure we didn't forget anything. I'm wondering if we should have pulled a trailer...

We got on the road at about 6:30am, and we had about a two and a half hour drive to Yellowstone in front of us. We had arranged to meet our guide at the Madison Junction Ranger Station at 10am.  The scenery on the drive was unreal. Natural beauty surrounded us. We made six stops along the way to take pictures...

Stop 1....Beautiful Teton mountain range

Stop 2: Our first bison sighting

Stop 2: More bison

Stop 3: Gorgeous lake and mountain view

Stop 4: We're actually leaving Grand Teton National Park, but we cheated and hopped across the road to the entrance for a pic.

Stop 5: Entering Yellowstone

Stop 5: It's not even 9am yet and I've taken 8.3 million pictures

Stop 6: Another bison grazing on the side of the road

We arrived at the station at about 9:45am; enough time to get our hiking boots on and lather up the girls and ourselves in sunscreen. We filled up Camelbacks and bottles with water for a nice day of sightseeing and hiking. Amy, our guide for the day, had us pile into her van and off we went.

If you have never been to Yellowstone, I highly recommend spending a few days here. We covered a lot of ground our first day....I'll sum it up in pictures:

Haley looking up at a wall of lava. Did you know that Yellowstone is an active volcano??

Our first hot spring sighting. The water in the spring is over 200 degrees! You can see it boiling.

Over the hill from the hot spring we happened upon a herd of bison. They were looking pretty mangy with their half-shed winter coats.

Emily and Ashley checking out a trumpeter swan. The kids are really enjoying all of the wildlife.

Fountain Geyser. Except for Old Faithful, geysers are pretty unpredictable. We were lucky to see this one going off right as we came up to it.

Lunch at Old Faithful Inn. This Inn is unbelievable. It was built in the early 1900s and it is stunning inside. Here, we are waiting for Old Faithful to erupt.

Thar she blows! Old Faithful can reach heights of over 180 feet.

Ashley photobombing my picture of a geyser. LOL!

One thing you learn in Yellowstone is.....if there are a ton of cars pulled over to the side of the road, you should pull over, too. There is usually something very cool to see. We saw this beautiful elk about 50 yards from the road.

And sometimes.....you don't even have to pull over. This guy walked right by our van! Such an incredible sight.

What a day! We thoroughly enjoyed our first day in Yellowstone. Our guide dropped us off back at the station, and we got in the truckster and headed to our condo, which is in West Yellowstone. West Yellowstone is a small town right across the Montana border, so we ended our day crossing our fourth state border.

The hills are alive……with the sound of Hummels

We got up early on Thursday, got the car packed (boy are we getting good at *that*), and were on the road out of Steamboat Springs by 6:30am. We had a drive to Jackson Hole.....Wyoming was awaiting us. We crossed our third state border at around 9am

At about noon, we stopped at a nice park for a picnic.  We are so thankful that the girls are still young enough that when they see a park, they want to play on it.  The girls played on the playground while we made lunch. It was a beautiful day.

Ok, so it's not that bad that Sherri keeps waking me up at the crack of dawn.  Because of this, we got into Jackson Hole at about 3pm with enough time to actually enjoy the village. Teton Village is a very quaint place, and we talked about possibly coming back up here to ski. We took a short walk over to the Jackson Hole Mountain Resort Tram and took the tram to the top of the mountain (10,450 ft). It was absolutely beautiful! There was a 360 degree view from the top and the girls were especially excited at seeing snow. We stopped for a moment of silence for our family and friends in Arizona who are suffering through 115+ degree heat. 

Here is the tram!

Grand Teton in the background

We hiked for a while and then the girls played in the snow.  Ashley even made a snow man! Believe it or not, one of the snowman’s eyes was made of bunny poop. The nose was made out of a pine cone. Well done, Ashley. Well done.

The hills are alive......with the sound of Hummel........ Wait, wrong vacation. Guess we'll have to wait until our next sabbatical to do a European Vacation.

One of the claims to fame of this tram is a small restaurant at the top that serves “World famous waffles”.  We had decided to have this wonderfully nutritious meal as our dinner and headed over there at about 5:05pm. We walked into the restaurant, which was hotter than a sauna, and found out that they shut down their waffle makers at 5pm. So, we did a little more sightseeing at the top of the mountain and then headed down the tram for some dinner. We ate at a nearby restaurant and then headed back to our room to get into our swimsuits.  The pool was very cool…. It had indoor and outdoor sections of the pool, and you had to swim under a wall to get from one to the other. It also had waterfalls, a couple of hot tubs, and a fire pit. 

After hanging out in the pool for a while, we went back to the room to get some sleep in preparation of another exciting day. This is just a guess here but I'm thinking it will be another early one...

“C’mon waves, is that the best that you can do?!”

I’ll give anyone who knows our daughters ONE guess as to who said that when we were rafting on Wednesday. 

The day started out….4 times. I woke up at 2am. Then 3:30am. Then 5:45am. And finally, 7:30am.  We thought it was going to get cold overnight in the (miniature) tents, but it was actually pleasant. The air mattresses stayed inflated, and the night was pretty comfortable. Not sure why I woke up so many times, but I was easily able to go back to sleep with nothing but the gurgles and splashes of the river right next to us. Right as we stepped out of our tents we were greeted with piping hot coffee, blueberry pancakes, and bacon. I am very impressed with this company, and highly recommend the overnight rafting trip with them. Look up AVA’s Colorado Rafting and Adventure Trips if you are in the area. 

We packed up our (tiny) tents, rolled up the air mattresses, and got all of our stuff packed up in the dry bags. One of our guides was responsible for getting all of the supplies and people’s stuff to the campsite and back. It looked like he had a pretty tough job, as he had to navigate a raft packed full with this stuff down the rapids. 

We got another lesson on paddling. I think this might have been a reflection of our skills the day before, because we noticed that the other raft didn’t get this refresher course. We pushed off at about 9am. It was an absolutely gorgeous day; the sun was streaming through the trees and bouncing off of the crystal clear river. We made our way through Brown’s Canyon, which was absolutely beautiful. There were high canyon walls, magnificent trees, squirrels, and “Mohawk ducks”, as our kids called them. 

The rapids were great, and there were a couple where we thought we might be thrown from the boat. As we were maneuvering one of these, the guide said, “Steve, move back a bit!” I looked around for someone on our raft named, “Steve”, and realized he was talking to me. Emily picked this up and ran with it, and has been calling me Steve ever since. 

One of the first rapids was pretty easy, and that is when Emily shouted, “C’mon waves, is that the best you can do?!” That kid is going to be running a company, or a country, some day. It is really hard to describe in text just how awe-inspiring and amazing this part of the rafting trip was. 

Haley

Ashley

That's Emily getting drenched in the front of the boat. If you decide not to row, there's a price!

10 miles after starting our trek down the river (the two day total was 21 miles), we pulled into a clearing. The van was there to pick us up, and they had fixings for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. This wasn’t even advertised as part of the package, so it was a nice touch. But, we had High Mountain Pies on the brain, so we passed on the sandwiches and loaded our stuff into the van. We headed back up to where we left our car the previous day. We packed all of our bare minimum necessities (like the stuffed animals) back in the car and headed back up to Leadville. On our way there we saw this awesome banner:

Sherri asked me to get out and take a picture of it. As I walked toward the banner, I realized that I recently upped the amount of my life insurance…..and wondered if this was a coincidence.

High Mountain Pies is a very popular place. This is challenging for them, as they literally have three tables inside the restaurant, and two of those tables only fit two people each. The rest of the seating is outside on the side and back of the restaurant. We ordered a large pizza and a calzone. They were very yummy. Emily got up and asked the manager if they had a High Mountain Pies in Arizona…alas, they do not….sorry kid.

We piled back into the car for a two and a half hour trip to Steamboat Springs, CO.  

This picture doesn't do justice to the view...it was stunning.

We got to the vacation rental condo that we booked, and the kids gave it a resounding “thumbs up.” It was a fun place for kids, as it had an upstairs with a loft. The kitchen and living area were downstairs and there were two beds upstairs. We went to the pool to hang out, and the girls alternated time between the hot tub and the pool.  Haley even got some practice laps in and lamented about how much practice she was missing. While we were hanging out at the pool, Sherri was doing a couple of loads of (free!) laundry. This is the realistic, but not fun part of a long trip like this. I’m intentionally omitting all of the lugging of luggage up and down to the hotel rooms, bathroom breaks, keeping the coolers stocked with food and ice, and constant Googling for directions and landmarks. Trying to keep it glamorous here, folks. For what it’s worth, I folded all the laundry!

Sherri joined us at the pool, and after we finished there we went back up to the room. We had a great family dinner of pasta and meat sauce while we watched some of the rafting video. We were all zapped after a fun-filled day, and we hit the sack at about 10:30pm.  

Dinner for dinner

Tuesday morning, another day to sleep in…..until 6am. We got the car packed, said our goodbyes to Kristin, Noah, and the kids, and grabbed some breakfast on the run. We then made a two and a half hour breathtaking drive to the town of Leadville. The scenery was unreal. The snowcapped mountains were surrounded by miles and miles of trees. And trees are green. And we don’t see green in Arizona. Lots and lots of brown. But no green. In Leadville, we stopped at a place called High Mountain Pies. Thank goodness for the Yelp app, as this place is just off the main street, and we wouldn’t have seen it. We wanted to order a pizza, but we were running tight on time so we order some sub sandwiches instead. But, we vowed to come back after our adventure.

After lunch, we headed to Buena Vista, CO, where we booked an overnight river rafting trip. We got all of our stuff packed away in a van, donned wetsuits, life jackets, and helmets, and then took a 15 minute bus ride to where the river rafting started. We were with two other groups; a dad and his two daughters and a grandma and her grandson. We got our own raft and guide, and the other groups were put together on a raft with a second guide. We were given instructions on how to row in the raft, how to help someone if they fall in (give them the T part of the paddle if you like them, and the paddle side if you don’t), and then we pushed off.  We spent the second half of the day paddling down the Arkansas River. The scenery was beautiful but the rapids weren't too challenging. However, that changed the next day. You’ll have to wait until I type up that blog post. And by the way, I’m doing this in the car. It’s my secret way of getting Sherri to do all the driving….shhhhhhhhhhhhh.

We pulled the rafts up to a clearing at around 5pm. We peeled off our wetsuits and put them out to dry. We were then given two small tents to put up for our family. We put the small tents up and then put some air mattresses in these small, small tents. These weren't your typical deflate-in-the-middle-of-the-night-and-wake-up-with-a-rock-jabbing-you-in-the-stomach air mattresses. These were heavy duty, real camping air mattresses. I asked the guy how to blow them up, and he gave me the same instructions you’d normally give someone if you wanted them to deflate a tire…put your finger in the middle of the nozzle and push in. This sounded ridiculous, but I simply couldn't wait to get into these minuscule tents, so I tried it. It worked. It was an overnight-river-rafting-trip-miracle. Why don’t they build them all this way? We jammed the inflated air mattresses and sleeping bags into the unbelievably tiny tents.

Ashley and Haley, figuring out the tents

Ashley taking a break and wondering if I can figure it out

We travel light. Only the necessities.

Tents completed. What a crew!

As we frolicked in the river (but only with our lifejackets….you MUST WEAR A LIFEJACKET IN THE RIVER EVEN IF YOU ARE IN 6 INCHES OF WATER), the guides were busy preparing the meal. One of the guides, Thomas, was fishing and caught a trout. Ashley and Emily ceremoniously named the trout “Dinner.”  Thomas gave them the choice to put the fish back in the river or to cook it. I thought the name they chose was a pretty big tip-off, Thomas.

Ashley with Dinner

Emily with Dinner

Sherri tried her hand at some fishing, and got the lure stuck in some rocks across the river. Thomas, a strapping young lad, removed his shirt, made a mighty swim across the current, freed the lure, and bravely swam back. I wasn't completely shocked when, 10 minutes later, Sherri got the lure stuck *AGAIN*.  I spent some time teaching the kids how to skip rocks (which was one of my favorite parts of the day), and the girls also spent time exploring.

The meal was amazing! We had an appetizer of chips and hummus and the guides cooked steak, baked potatoes, fresh vegetables, and garlic bread. They made a sour cream and fresh herbs mixture for the potatoes. This is my kind of camping!

Waiting for the yummy steaks...

The kids ate dinner and a little bit of Dinner. They loved dinner, but thought Dinner was just “ok”.  The guides made a Dutch oven out of a pot and some white hot coals and were cooking something in it while we were eating. When we finished our meal, they served some awesome mixed berry cobbler out of the pot. We sat around and talked for a while, and then people started heading to their tiny tents to sleep. Sherri, Ashley, and Emily headed to bed and Haley and I stayed up to sit under the stars. It was beautiful. We saw satellites, shooting stars, the Big Dipper, and fireflies. We talked quite a bit. About everything. About nothing. I really enjoyed it.

Ashley and Sherri trying out the tent.

Emily, roughing it with her zebra, Big Stomple

Me and Haley in our HUGE tent.