Yellowstone is the oldest National Park in the US and the 2nd oldest in the world! It is also sitting on a super volcano. I did not realize this until our trip!! Let me first say if you've never used the GyPsy app.... get it! It's wonderful! It's like your own personal tour guide. We turned it on as we were leaving Jackson Hole and the guy started giving us history and telling us points to stop for pictures, etc. I really can't say enough about this app. It's amazing!
Here's the Yellowstone map. We were traveling from Jackson Hole, Grand Tetons to the south entrance of the park.
👈It takes around 2 hours to get to the south entrance. The scenery with the mountains and the snow on the top on our drive was incredible!
Now that we are inside the park I asked Gary what he wanted to do. Our first 2 nights inside the park was at Old Faithful. So we had the option if you look at the map of going towards fishing bridge for a bit and then back to Old Faithful or just straight on to Old Faithful. We decided since we were ahead of schedule that we would go on the Old Faithful and maybe check in our cabin and get settled. Well, they wouldn't let us check in till 3:30 or 4pm and it was around 11:30 when we arrived. I was so pumped about going to see the Geyers and stuff that I said let's walk awhile and then grab lunch. We weren't starving yet because we had a late breakfast. Well, after a short walk and Gary realizing that it was going to be A LOT of walking, he said he was going back to set at the Old Faithful on the benches they had all around and wait on me to go look around. I asked him if he was sure and he said he was so I left him sitting and I went off on my own. I got so busy taking pictures and really just being amazed at everything that I lost track of time. And then I came upon the "Grand" Geyser. They had benches here also for people to sit and wait for it to erupt like back at Old Faithful. Tons of people were already sitting and waiting so I decided to sit. I soon began chatting with an older couple who told me that I really needed to see the grand erupt. It's the biggest geyser in the park. By this time I look at my watch and was like OMG I better text Gary. Well, I had no signal! I even tried to call and it wouldn't work. Then I remembered my friend telling me that I would have limited cell service inside the park! I had not even thought about that when Gary and I separated. I sat there wondering if I should go back or stay. I decided I would stay awhile. Heck, Gary had told me to go on and look around. It still wasn't time for us to check in our room. So I sat waiting with all those people. Minutes upon minutes went on and on and on eruption! I was like what the heck! Then the couple began explaining to me that the Grand is not like Old Faithful. They have an estimated time on the Grand and there is then like a 45 minutes plus or minus time around their estimated time that it should erupt! Well, I had sat there until it was AFTER all those predictions and the darn thing had not went off! So I decided I really needed to get back before Gary killed me. Now here's the funny part..... When I got back and found Gary among what seemed like a million people sitting waiting on the Old Faithful to erupt I could tell on his face he was not happy. He had reported me MISSING to the rangers!! I felt so bad! We had to go to the rangers office to tell them I was no longer missing. They laughed, but Gary did not. 😏
By this time we could check into our cabin. We check in and guess what NO TV.... I was perfectly fine, but Gary was not. Not only was he mad we had no cell service, now he had no TV 😅 I told him we were on an "unplugged" vacation. He said the plugging should be optional not mandatory... 😕 I asked him if we wanted to go look around with me and he said no he was just going to take a nap and I could go do whatever I wanted. So I grabbed my camera and off I went again. Man I was getting my miles in walking. It was like a 2 mile loop on the boardwalk to see most of the Geysers and way down at the end was the morning glory pool which I really wanted to go see. I made it there and also got to see the river geyser erupt and a beautiful rainbow formed! It was AMAZING. I sure hated Gary was in the room missing all the sites. Here are some pictures:
This is Old Faithful going off.
I made it down to the morning glory pool and it was beautiful.
As I was walking back, I stopped at the River Geyer. It was getting time for it to also erupt so I decided to wait a few minutes and check it out. It was also fabulous!! and what was even more cool was a rainbow formed right there when it was erupting! I so hated Gary was missing all this beautiful stuff!
How amazing is that!!
By the time I got back to our cabin it was supper time. I told Gary that the lady that had checked me in how mentioned the snow lodge for dinner. She said the food was real good. It was within walking distance of our cabin. So far inside the park you could not go in and eat! We had found that out at lunch time when we walked to the Old Faithful. You could get carryout. We were hoping we could go inside the snow lodge and sit down for a nice meal. Well..... NOPE! They were not allowing people inside. You had to stand in a long line and place your order and then go sit outside and wait to be called. Gary was furious. It was a tad warm that evening and we had to sit in the sun and wait for our food. It was either than or drive 3 hours back to Jackson Hole to eat. I knew before we went that I had read that things would be limited inside the park still due to covid. I just didn't realize there would be no where that we could go inside and eat. You could however walk to the bar inside and order a drink. You could not sit down inside, but at least I was able to get us 2 drinks to take the edge off being outside in the sun. 😜 This was basically our first day inside the park. We were both asleep early that night.
The next day we were up ready to hit the road by 6am, however the breakfast place didn't open till 6:30am so we had to wait around to grab some food before heading out. We decided to head towards Fishing Bridge on the map. We would stop at Yellowstone Lake and Yellowstone Lake Lodge and see how long that took us. We ended up having time to travel on to Canyon Village and I'm glad we were able to do that because the road from Canyon Village to the east entrance was closed! So this kind of changed my plan to counter clockwise see Yellowstone. Yellowstone lake is HUGE! and the Lodge is a HUGE YELLOW building. It's beautiful. Fishing Bridge area is cool. It's also where you can usually see bears. We were able to see a Grizzly with a cub! However, if it had not been for the group of people on the side of the road we would not have seen her. They all had these huge spotting scopes! I was able to get a fairly nice picture with my long zoom lens on camera. Here are a few pictures:
There are so many stops along the way. So thankful we had the GyPsy app that told us where to stop and what we were looking at. I highly recommend the app!
The Grand Canyon of Yellowstone is beautiful. We grabbed some pictures from artist point and I also walked to see a waterfall while Gary sat in the car again. AND I got to see another rainbow at the waterfall. God was really showing off his master piece.
We were able to grab a sandwich to go from the Yellowstone Hotel (not sit down in there either!). We had a LONG full day and saw so much. We made it back to our cabin for our last night at Old Faithful in time for the sunset at the Old Faithful Geyser. What a fabulous day!
The next day we would head to the Silver Gate entrance of Yellowstone heading trough Mammoth for our next 2 nights at Silver Gate Lodging.
More to come later....
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