Tuesday, May 18th

We started the day at about 5:30 after spending the night in a KOA camp ground in Cody, Wyoming. That’s a.m. Breakfast was English muffins, sausage patties, oj and milk. Then we started our trek to Yellowstone, which was about 85 miles away. As soon as we arrived, we registered at the camp ground at Fishing Bridge, a “town” that consists of a (very) few stores that qualify as genuine tourist traps.


After that, we began our tour of the park. The first stop was the West Thumb Paint Pots.

I never in my wildest dreams expected to witness the phenomenon of Old Faithful, but we got lucky to arrive just minutes before it blew. I got a great picture of the geyser and the hundreds of people gathered to watch it. Maybe I’ll be able to figure out how to post a picture before the trip is over. Cliff says that there should be a geyser in the park dedicated to senior citizens. It would be called the Geezer Geyser. No guffawing now. He’s serious.

From there. we stopped at several geysers. That stuff bubbling up to the surface is coming from close to the Earth’s core. Makes you think twice about standing around in Yellowstone which is a super volcano. The next eruption is overdue by several thousand years. We agreed that we would rather be at the site of the eruption than someplace afar.

We saw a number of elk and large herds of Bison, or as the Sioux called them, tatanka. Actually, a few of the big guys decided to take a walk-about down the highway. After all, it’s their land and they’re entitled to go wherever they choose. I think they looked kind of smug at all of us tourists taking pictures of them on the highway.

We hoped to see the Canyon today but the weather was against us. It not only rained on us in late afternoon but at one point we had wet snow falling to add to the already existing several feet on the ground. Good grief! What are Floridians to do?! And, as I write this much later in the evening, it continues raining and has been for a couple of hours. We are counting on fair weather tomorrow.

This afternoon we encountered road construction that caused a considerable delay and the park service person who explained the situation to each of us in line commented that we must be among the 151 other RVs she had found out about. We continue encountering other participants as we progress through the tourist sites.

After we have breakfast and Cliff does the obligatory filling and dumping, we will visit a couple more spots in the park before moving on to Spokane, WA, our next way point.