What an amazing few days. We drove to Yellowstone and made our "normal" stop at an animal shelter (wherever we travel we stop and say hello to the cats and pay it forward by donating an adoption fee for the next person who comes in) and it was hard to get the kids back in the car.
Off the grid - the hotel we were staying in had no cell signal, no WiFi in the rooms, and no TV - it was AWESOME! We played games, explored, and walked over to the lobby to look at all of the people huddled there checking their phones (the lobby was the only place that had WiFi). I will say, when my 14 year old son first heard this news, there were tears (and not of joy) and then he got over it.
We explored Yellowstone from top to bottom and saw at least 500 bison, some coming right up to the car and others rolling in the dirt.
My kids were on animal spotting duty and they did very well, though it was not hard as every bend in the road you ran into a new group.
We decided to watch Old Faithful and were underwhelmed, mostly because of the volume of people there with us but also after seeing some of the more peaceful geysers it seemed a bit commercial.
Mia hated the smell of the geysers and repeatedly made a gagging sound that every tourist around us found very amusing. At one point she had to pull her shirt over her nose and run back to the car. I think the smell reminded me of those old smoke bombs - yuuummmm sulfur.
What I learned in Yellowstone - we are very insignificant in this world. We scratched the surface of this area and we could have stayed there a lifetime and not seen everything. Now, expand that out to the world and we become very small, very fast. Also that no matter the disaster, the earth will rebuild. Seeing the damage the last fire caused was sad but seeing the regrowth was inspiring.
What I appreciated about Yellowstone - all of the different languages. At one point I closed my eyes and listened to at least seven different languages.
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