Well, here I am way beyond the point of ridiculousness… far behind on my blog posts! I hate to even think about it, so I try not to. I thought it was difficult keeping this blog up to date while we were on the road, but it has proven even more challenging at home. Home is where life starts happening all around you again, generating a multitude of demands for your time and attention. There has certainly been no shortage of such things ever since we got back. Add to that my propensity for getting distracted, and this is the result. Sometimes it makes me want to carve out a shelter under a fallen tree on a mountainside somewhere. I could subsist on nuts and berries… take my chances with the bears, you know? Of course, that would be the end of my blog, and I’d have to take up whittling or basket weaving – which wouldn’t be entirely bad. Since I’m not quite to that point, I’ll pick up where I left off on my last post. I have lots of other exciting things to share, too, so let’s do this!
Moving on, we left the Badlands and made a beeline to Colorado, the last remaining “must see” place on our list for this trip. We stayed over one night in a hotel, which had a prairie dog town right next to the parking lot! It was a short drive the next day to Dillon.
On the first half of our big adventure, we skipped a few planned stops due to weather and vehicle repairs, and other stops were shortened due to weather as well. Yellowstone was one of those, and a place we wanted to return to. This put us far ahead of our original schedule, and the resulting “surplus” of time prompted our decision to see Yellowstone again on our way south. We went back to the campground near Gardiner which was quite full, but we found a site and set up. The campground host recognized the Jeep and came over to chat for a bit, and let us know where he’d seen a couple of bears, as well as where to get free drinking water – very nice and helpful of him. We finished situating things and headed off for the park. After negotiating the elk-induced traffic jam at Mammoth Hot Springs, we took the road east.
I’ve heard it all three ways, and that kind of thing bugs me! I think it should be pronounced Mt. Ray-nee-ur, but I don’t live there, so I don’t get to decide what the rainy place gets called. No matter how you say it, the roads leading to Mt. Rainier National Park were rich with the dense green foliage one expects to find in a rainforest, which is the climate we were venturing into.
Upon waking in Kaibab National Forest at our wonderful, free and very primitive campsite, we set about our morning routine.
As I was brushing my teeth, some movement on the ground a few feet away caught my attention. At first it looked like a toad, and when it moved it did so in a toad-like fashion.
Let me start with a couple of pictures I forgot to include in my last post. We saw tons of these oil wells driving through both Texas and New Mexico.
