Drving to Yellowstone National Park

After our last update back in Mount Rushmore, we have managed to do many things and have taken over 1200 pictures. This puts our total pictures for the trip up to 2500. I am confident we will soon fill up each of our iPods and have no where to store all these photos. Perhaps I should have bought a USB external hard drive. Anyway, we left Mount Rushmore in the afternoon and Mike took the first shift driving. The drive was uneventful and we stopped in Buffalo for dinner. After dinner Kyle took over and drove us to a Wal-Mart about 110 miles away from the entrance to Yellowstone. While Kyle was driving, Mike and I played backgammon and partied a bit with our good friend Jose Cuervo. This party led to Mike falling out of his bed in the middle of the night. The picture can be seen in our photo album.

The next morning I arose around 7:30 and got us on the road. Both Kyle and Mike slept most of the way during my drive and I was glad when they woke up when we stopped. It was then that we found out that Mike had left the Gas cap in Buffalo, WY at our last gas stop. I turned over control of the RV to Kyle and went back to sleep. I actually ended up sleeping most of the way through Yellowstone and arose shortly before we reached the KOA that would be our home for the next two days. Upon our arrival we headed straight for the hot tub and enjoyed the water for an hour or so.

The people whom you meet in places like RV parks are always interesting. In the hot tub we met a man from Vegas who was rather interesting. He and his wife were traveling for essentially the last time because she had been recently diagnosed with stomach cancer and was given two months to live. He offered this information to us within minutes of us joining him in the hot tub and we struggled to respond in an appropriate manner. We continued to talk to him and he turned out to be quite an outspoken individual and gave us advice on all sorts of things to do in and around Vegas and recommended we stay away from the gay RV resort there.

After the hot tub we enjoyed cooking dinner over an open flame beside the RV. I find that food cooked over an open flame is always tasty. Mike reserved us a rent-a-car for the next day and we tucked in for what proved to be a rather cold nights sleep. Unbeknown to us it gets rather cold here at night and this was no exception. Up until this point I had been sleeping with a sheet and a light fleece. Here at 6500 feet that was not enough to keep warm. I awoke extremely cold in the middle of the night and stumbled around looking for my sleeping bag. Turns out it got down to 38 degrees that night. I'll let Mike write about our day in Yellowstone.

-Dave