Yellowstone, or Mommy tries to pack a week long visit into one day and everyone survives

Doing Yellowstone in one day is like doing the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art in one day -- a marathon. It really isn't possible to see everything, but we gave it our best shot.  We started off at breakfast running into a dear friend from our time in Boston.  She was traveling with her four kids, who match up pretty closely with ours.  We haven't seen them in 10+ years, and it was wonderful to briefly catch up.  We agreed that it is too bad we don't live closer as we'd have great fun traveling together with the kids!

And that was just breakfast.  We started in the park at Old Faithful, arriving at the perfect time to check out the visitor's center and then join the thousands of people surrounding the geyser to watch it blow.  It was pretty cool to see it go off, and see the enthusiasm of the crowd.  After a yummy lunch (big improvement over the previous day) we started off on a tour of the geyser basins.  We saw hot springs, mud pots, smaller geysers, prismatic springs, etc.  The only thing we missed was the eruption of Steamboat Geyser - first time in 8 years, the day we were at the park, and we didn't even know.

We decided that we had time to see the canyon of the Yellowstone, which was as lovely as expected.  Beautiful yellow walls, and not very many people as it was just about to rain.  We ate dinner in the park at the canyon cafeteria.  The food was good  -- everyone found something they liked.  The kids were reasonably well behaved, and because everyone was fed, the drive back to the hotel (wildlife stops included) was pleasant.

 Bison walking by our car.

Woman trying to get bison's attention?  We stayed in the car.

The funniest part of Yellowstone was the wildlife spotting.  We saw a couple of bison, fairly close to the road.  But at one point there was a huge backlog of cars.  Cars were stopped all over and people were jumping out of their vehicles and tromping 10-12 feet into the woods to find"it."  We couldn't tell what animal it was that people were looking for.  We realized that the people getting out of their cars didn't know what it was either, just that other people had stopped!  We thought it might be fun to try to fake an animal sighting, (Can't you see it? It's right over there!) to see if we could start our own bear jam (park name for these traffic slowdowns.)  Might have been fun, but we were headed to the hotel for swimming in the pool and laundry so we skipped it.

Next time we'll have to do Mammoth and the east side of the park.