Yellowstone, as mentioned earlier, lived up to the hype that we had heard about. Since we had driven a route that allowed us to go a second time (plus not having to pay an entrance fee since we have a pass) we had to stop, and actually camp there overnight in Wooty. It was well worth it.

We felt extremely lucky that we were able to see the park in different climates. The first time around, it was very cold, with a lot of snow around. This was great, but it did lead to roads being closed off along with some cool sites that we wished we could've seen. When we came through the entrance this time around, it seemed almost like a new world. 

The sun was out, almost no snow was visible, extra roads were open to explore, and we saw some weird new sites. Artists' Paint Pots area was very peculiar. I felt like I was watching some 80s horror movie, because half of these views resembled poor special effects. One in particular was this weird pool of gray gunk. It looked to be very thick, but a tad watery. Every now and then, the pressure would build up and it would spit a glob straight up in the air a foot or two, and slop back down into itself. Each time it spat up it made gross noises, which was somewhat amusing - especially when little kids saw it because of how much they laughed at the noises (well, me too. I guess I'm still a kid). Artists' Paint Pots was a site that was closed off to us earlier in the year, and had more to see than just globs of gunk.

Geysers could also be seen scattered about this area. They weren't to the size of Old Faithful, but had much different colors about them. You couldn't get too close to them, either, since they were extremely hot. I can't recall the exact temperatures it claimed to reach, but I know it was enough to scorch your skin. So, like most warning signs in nature, bright colors looked pretty, but weren't always a good thing to mess with. Speaking of geysers, we had to see Old Faithful again.

This time we had the luxury to film and take pictures without the blasts of cold wind. Since it's an approximation of when Old Faithful will go off, the last time I was filming my hands were freezing because I was holding onto cold, metal, electronic video camera (yeah metal. It's an old camera) for what seemed to be way too long. Now we could goof around without much care. Of course, this meant taking weird pictures. No, seeing Old Faithful didn't get old. We saw it just a few weeks earlier, and it was cool to see it again. Something else that we saw again were the Buffalo.

I accidently saw them up close, as I decided to go for a run. We woke up fairly early, and didn't have much planned for the day, so I went for a run. As I wondered down an ordinary road, I spotted a trail, and figured that'd be way more fun than just a boring road. It was, but it was also a bit intimidating. The trail lead up to a small stream, and a very picturesque mountain scene...with Buffalo. Time and time again we were handed flyers about how Buffalo gored visitors frequently. I kept my distance, but it was a little unnerving. I forgot about the Buffaloes temporarily as a family in a station wagon drove by, stuck a camera out and yelled at me, "this is the best wildlife we've seen all day!" Maybe he thought I was a deer?

Unfortunately, we had to leave Yellowstone. After our favorite National Park, we made our way to Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota. This was pretty much a preview for Badlands National Park, as we saw the Badlands surrounding us. Describing the Badlands is almost like describing the Grand Canyon. You could do a great job, but not as great as a picture. A picture does a decent job, but not as great as seeing it in person. So, I'll just slap a photo in here for ya.

One funny thing we came across was the Prarie Dog towns. Calling it a town is very underrating these creatures. There were hundreds and hundreds of little mounds that Prarie Dogs would jump out of and poke their heads up. If it weren't for a sign, you'd probably just pass these places, because they don't look like much until you get closer. What looks like an open field from a distance with nothing going on is actually a Prarie Dog Rave that never ends. They make weird squeaky noises, and I'm sure Fink would've had a field day with them if she could fit into their tiny tunnels. We weren't about to test that out, though. After reaching our campsite, we decided to just hang out a bit.

As I was on the phone, Kim began to wander around. She found Buffalo not far from us and our bus. I felt pretty safe in the fact that if worse came to worse, I could just jump in the bus and wait for the crushing sounds of Buffalo smashing in our precious Wooty, but Kim wasn't quite that invincible. I guess she's so small that the Buffalo didn't notice her, or she had so little meat on her that they didn't care. Whichever the case, the Buffalo left her alone to take pictures. How nice. Our next stop planned was a site that nobody should ever pass up on a road trip: Mount Rushmore

 We were leaving the bright sun and high heat to head towards Potato Country. For hours we were driving and the scenery didn't seem to change much. I expected this, though. I had very little knowledge on this northern state, and I honestly didn't know too much other than the whole potato ordeal and that it was somewhat desolate. Having this minimal understanding, I wasn't too surprised to see little - until something caught my eye.

The bus was cruising along when I had to suddenly stop. It wasn't a cow or anything standing in the road, but a car. This car wasn't parked, it wasn't another bus, it was sitting in the middle of a small pond. At one point, it may have been a demo years back, because all that was left of this thing was the frame. What it was doing here, I have no clue. I doubt it was placed there for scenic purposes, but even if it was just stranded there, whoever was driving it must have had some fun. The abandoned car was far from the road, and literally just sitting in a shallow pond. Weird. After glaring at some Idaho wonders, we made our way to another one: Craters of the Moon.

When we're driving, Kim is navigating and the one who sees the pictures of the park before we get there. I have to use my imagination most of the time to what something may look like. When I heard, "Craters of the Moon" I was thinking lots of holes and possibly Nickelodeon Moon Shoes for sale in the gift shop. I wasn't right on either (unfortunately, Fink would've looked good in those) but I was shocked by what we saw.

This park was really a giant lava bed. From the large jagged rocks to the smooth, once flowing lava, what we saw did not seem to fit in Idaho. The first time that Kim talked about this park, I just assumed that this place couldn't be too huge or too crazy because, "it's Idaho." Idaho's stock was going up in my book. With the initial shock of the dramatically different views, we explored the place a bit.

Soon this park took another turn I didn't expect: caves. Most of the time at parks, you need a guide or have to sign something. Anything goes in Idaho, apparently. We walked up to one of the caves, and the only sign near the entrance read, "cave here." What I liked even more was that there wasn't a paved path that you were supposed to take, or numbered signs that pointed out useless facts. The cave was just wide open, left untamed for you to explore how you choose. Sweet. The park was not anything like I anticipated, but I loved it. We saw something I didn't expect at all in Idaho, but we eventually did see something that I thought I would.

Spending $3 to get into the Idaho Potato Museum could be the best money I spent so far. For some reason, seeing tons of different potatoes and explanations on how they differ was extremely amusing to me. From the Spudbob Starchpants t-shirts to the hundreds of displayed potato mashers, I was entertained tenfold. While I explored different Potato Machinery from past to present, Kim watched an educational video dealing with how the potato has influenced the state of Idaho. Needless to say, this was my favorite museum (maybe rivaling the weather museum in Punxsutawney, PA). After seeing the magic created by potatoes, we had to keep heading East towards home. 

The best part about heading east at this point meant that we got to re-visit some of our favorite sights: Grand Teton and Yellowstone. Our first stop would be Grand Teton. This time around, it wasn't nearly as snowy or frigid out, and more roads were open. Seeing grass and open roads made the park look completely different. Last time we could drive on just part of one road, which only had a few pull-offs to view the mountains. Now most roads were open, and people were driving boats around and fishing as if this place had been active all year. This only meant new and great scenery.

We were able to walk up to crystal clear water in which I couldn't control my urge to not skip stones. Once my arm began to fizzle out like Jamie Moyer, we just wandered the park in awe of how different everything was. The snow was only visible on the peaks of mountains, but Westy and Fink didn't seem to notice. Most of the time their top priorities are eating and bothering us while we're trying to find out where we are. After we saw the 'new' Grand Teton National Park, we made out way to our favorite park: Yellowstone.

 I told myself this wouldn't happen, but it has. We are falling behind on these blogs terribly. We do have an excuse, though: no internet. Well, that's not completely true. There have been times while traveling that we've been able to manage to get internet to do quick things like check email, but other than that, we've been camping for the most part. National Forest stops and lack of RV campsites have led us to update this blog very infrequently. We apologize. With all that said, now for the fun...

Wyoming began with stopping at Grand Teton National Park. We should have looked into weather more in advance, because many of the north western parks still have many roads and trails closed because of snowy conditions. That wasn't a disaster though, because we were still able to see Grand Teton, and plan which routes we want to hike and climb in the future. One thing that seemed insane besides the views of this park was the weather.

When first arriving in the park, we thought we were going to have bright blue, cloud covered skies to make us look like we were awesome photographers. After spending a few minutes in the visitor center, we found out that it was now raining. We kept driving through the park, and the first pull off the rain seemed to stop. While staring at the massive mountains, we could watch the clouds slowly cover the mountains and head in our direction. Racing around the inside of the bus (not as easy as it sounds) we grabbed cameras and tripods in fear that the mountains would soon be invisible from the fast moving clouds. After taking some pictures, we kept traveling through the park.

The same rushed process of grabbing cameras and hoping to capture cool sites on film repeated itself several times, until we realized that it wasn't clouds that we covering the mountains. It was a snow storm. We drove the furthest we could in the roads that we accessible in the park, and then had to turn around. Facing the storm head on lasted a few minutes, and then we were able to see the same sites without the snow fall. Suddenly the weather was clear and we were warming right up. Not too shabby. We thought the sites and weather were crazy in Teton, but we had some interesting unplanned events ahead of us.

We drove away from Teton to reach Yellowstone. To do this, we had to go through a small portion of Idaho because roads were closed. Of course the roads that were open were one lane roads winding around a mountain (obviously not pictured. But this is a cool site we saw). The Woot Wagen chugged it's way to the top of the steep road - almost. I looked in my rear view mirror to find our we were being pulled over. While driving uphill, the bus was doing around 25 mph. Despite there being a speed limit 10 mph faster, we were going too slow according to the officer. On top of that, even though there wasn't one sign warning us, apparently we are supposed to use pull offs to let other cars pass.

I would have done this, but there wasn't a single pull off on our side of the road, and the few that were on the other side weren't accessible. There was steady traffic flow in the opposite direction, so I would have had to sit there, in the manual bus that loves hills, waiting probably 10-15 minutes to pull in. I figured a slow steady 25 mph would benefit the cars behind us better than waiting, but the cop didn't think so. We got off on a warning. No harm I guess. Oh, I did almost forget to mention that he pulled us over about 20 meters before the peak of the road, and the boarder of the state. What a nice guy. Now I just needed to get close enough to Yellowstone and find a place to sleep.

That wasn't easy in the least. Whenever we're about to find a place to camp, Kim has at least one, and sometimes more, back up places where we can camp. Despite websites saying roads were open, I wasn't about to take the bus through a foot of snow down roads after dark. For the record, we usually like to find a camping spot before it gets dark out. Thankfully the moon was out and helped light our way a bit, because we were driving for hours before we found a place to camp. 

We were back to the cold driving we once experienced. The breeze from the back of the bus didn't help, and we just wanted to stop. There was almost a moment that we stopped at a hotel. Instead, I was checking out any place that said RV Camping. When a sign popped up suddenly, I went to brake and realized how bad the roads really were. The wheels locked fine, but we were on ice. It's always reassuring to see your speedometer drop to zero while you're still moving fast. Nothing bad happened, and we kept moving onward until we were just a couple of miles outside Yellowstone.

This old, blinking sign found our sorry eyes at about 10:30 PM. It said open, but when I went to the office, all lights were shut off. There was an old dot matrix printed sign on the window that told me to knock on the trailer next to the house we were parked next to for service. I was frozen, didn't want to move, but I didn't want to stay cold. I walked over to the trailer, but it looked as friendly as a cemetery. Hesitantly, I knocked on the door, and could hear some AM talk radio on, but no answer. Even though I really didn't want to in fear of not knowing what could happen, I knocked louder a second time. Again, no answer, just fuzzy radio. I walked back to the bus. 

I re-read the old sign posted on the door window of the office, and there was a cell phone number to call as well. Thankfully, we had one bar of battery life left. I called, thinking I woke someone up, but a guy answered and said he'd be right over. After seeing this guy's trailer, I was assuming I was about to encounter a tired and grumpy guy who only wanted to sleep - not help me find a place to stay. After waiting about 3 minutes, the friendliest guy came over with a chipper attitude, and unlocked the office. The form I filled out was barely legible since my hands were so cold. What really surprised me though was the fact that Evil Knievel was a frequent visitor of this place. He knew the owner, and they were best buds (it showed since there were about 50 photos displayed under the glass top desk). Who'd a thought? With the bus finally stopped, so we then passed out for the night.

Yellowstone is our favorite of the National Parks to date. Better than Grand Canyon, and even Yosemite. There was much of the park that was closed, but there was still a lot to do and see. Not two minutes into driving into the park we saw a bald eagle. It was far away for our camera, but still a great sight to see. We drove around the park and were just in awe of what we saw. Elk were everywhere, and just about asking to have their pictures taken. I bet there are millions of dollars made from nature photographs in this park. Most of the scenery just seems like it's begging to be hung up in some log cabin. Of course, this meant we were busy taking pictures and taping - until we were forced to stop.

It wasn't an officer or ranger that was stopping us this time. What made us pull over was a giant herd of Buffalo. They were walking down the street like it was part of a path they had to take. A ranger was just ahead of them, and told us that they'd walk right around our vehicle. Sure enough, some were literally an arm's length away from us. Fink was staring intently, and Westy kept whining because she wanted to get out and play with them. I've seen ducks, geese, and deer cross roads. Never have I seen a large group of Buffalo walk down a road. It was a very cool surprise, but wasn't the last thing we did in Yellowstone.

We had to see Old Faithful if we were in Yellowstone. Thankfully, one thing we did plan right was the timing of the geyser. Just one week before the road opened up to go and watch the spewing attraction. The only downfall was that it's an estimation when it goes off. We were outside grasping our cameras waiting. This only made out hands colder, and it also began to rain ice it seemed. After 15 minutes, we finally had some pictures and footage, but not before we had to warm ourselves up. This is when we got jealous of people who hopped back into their vehicles to crank the heat for five minutes to recover. After seeing Yellowstone, we weren't disappointed, so we didn't think much about the cold. Even though we didn't want to leave, we did want to start heading towards our next destination: Bozeman, Montana.