Day 11: Big Sandy, MT

Spent most of today driving in Montana. Stopped off in Helena for a bowl of chili and a huckleberry milkshake (yeah I know they don't exactly pair well), and I saw a weird drawing on the sidewalk. Seems like a Wizard of Oz reference, but no idea why it was there.


After some GPS mishaps that had me stuck on a dirt road for half an hour, I finally made it to Big Sandy. Tomorrow: the road trip gets put on hold so I can watch Pats-bengals.

Day 10: On to Montana

Remember when the sub commander in The Hunt for Red October gets shot and his last words are "I would have liked to have seen Montana..."? I vowed to never end up like that guy.

Mission accomplished.

Day 10: Yellowstone, WY

A few other random pictures from around the park. The geothermal properties of this area create some really funky looking pools that strange, colorful bacteria can grow in.

Day 10: Yellowstone Geysers

Another crappy morning with gray clouds and misty rain. Oh, and a high of 45 degrees.

As everyone knows, the biggest attraction here is Old Faithful. This is reinforced by the fact that the Old Faithful Village is the only place I can get cell service and/or Wi-Fi. Since it erupts every 90 minutes, it is certainly a convenient attraction for most tourists.

BUT, if you want to see an impressive, yet less cooperative geyser, I would suggest the Grand Geyser, located a 5-minute walk away. It only erupts every 8-10 hours, but is significantly less predictable. As we walked by today, the prediction was for the geyser to erupt between 7:45am and 10:45am (the current time was 11am). Several people had been waiting there for about 2 hours. We hung around for another half hour before deciding to walk further down the path and check out some other stuff. Not 5 minutes later, we turned around and saw the eruption:

Fortunately, the eruption lasts for nearly 10 minutes, so we had enough time to go back and experience it up close. Pictures CANNOT do it justice, but here is my attempt to do so:

Day 9: Yellowstone Canyon

Although the weather had been extremely cooperative up to this point, today was the inevitable cloudy, overcast, rainy day. Not great for pictures, but since my dad says a good photographer should be able to shoot in any light, we gave it a shot anyway.

(Liberal use of Picasa's touch-up features helps too)

Yellowstone Canyon is pretty impressive, what with the sulfur-colored walls and all. We also got a chance to take a few "moderately strenuous" hikes to get some views of the falls. In one case, this hike consisted of ~300 stairs (yay!). Compounding that was the realization that the elevation is about 6000 ft, which made me feel REALLY out of shape. On the plus side, this time of year the park is filled with mostly retirees, so by comparison I felt like a marathon runner.