Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Road Trip

It's been a huge week, our road trip. We saw so many places and people. We stayed in Butte with Lorraine and Gary, watched 4th of July fireworks with Kirbie, EB, the boys, and little Kyla. We stayed in Bozeman with Bernie and Jo Marie and went hiking with Pat and his daughter Amy. We visited the Museum of the Rockies, a neat little museum with tons of dinosaur bones.

From there, we enjoyed the outdoors in Montana and Wyoming. We took the longer more scenic route from Bozeman to Yellowstone through the Beartooth range and entered Yellowstone through the North East entrance at Cooke City. Right away, barely inside the park, we saw cars pulled off to the side and dozens of people taking pictures of a sizeable black bear just a 100 yards away. A ranger was standing by making sure that people kept their distance.

We stopped to look at the upper and lower falls before heading to our campground at Bridge Bay near Yellowstone Lake. Though the campgrounds were full, we enjoyed our camping experience with grilled hot dogs, baked beans, and smores.

Up early the next morning, we headed North to do a counter-clockwise route on the lower loop of the figure eight inside Yellowstone ending at Old Faithful. Our favorites were the green and blue colored Emerald and Sapphire pools.

After we watched Old Faithful in the afternoon, we headed South to Grand Teton National Park where we camped for the night on the North side of Jackson lake at Lizard Creek.

We enjoyed the view of the Tetons as we drove South towards Jackson on our way to Salt Lake City for my sister's wedding. Wedding festivities went well and we all helped out to make it a big success. We had a blast with my twin niece and nephew and enjoyed meeting with all my other family. It's the only time we've all been together since my sister and her now husband got together, so my Grandmother insisted that we make sure to get some family photos.

Heading out, we decided to take the more scenic route through Bend rather than the Interstate down the gorge. However, we were disappointed to find that highway 242 that we've both wanted to take is closed for construction until mid-August.

Friday, July 3, 2009

Celebrate!!!

We made it to our first stop on the big summer road trip. My sister and her family drove up from Wyoming just to hang out with us in Butte.

:)

Happy 4th of July!

Tomorrow is the parade. More pictures soon.