Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Our adventure over the last few days...

Our drive from Colorado to Yellowstone was quite interesting. My husband came up with the idea to count antelope along the way, but the way in which we did it was a game. The first one to spot an antelope got to count that antelope, plus any others with it. We counted over 600 antelope in a 300 mile radius. The largest heard was 70 - found by the older twin. The picture below was taken as we passed by the Grand Tetons before heading into Yellowstone (see the herd of buffalo?).Once we arrived in Yellowstone we encountered deer, antelope, elk, chipmunks, and buffalo (lots of buffalo!). We wanted to see a moose or bear, but never did. Our first night walking through the woods we encountered this elk right by the road.We left Colorado a day early, thinking school has started so surely there will be somewhere to stay...boy were we wrong! There wasn't a hotel anywhere within a hundred miles! There was, however, a tent in one of the general stores and we had plenty of blankets so we decided to rough it. Oh...one other interesting fact, it was only a three-man tent and there was four of us. We thought since the twins are a little smaller than us we'd be fine, but once we laid down to sleep we all had to turn at the same time...kind of like a rotisserie! We didn't get much sleep since about every 15 minutes our bodies started to ache.
The place we camped was called "Bear Country" and they warned us not to take anything at all in our tents since five days earlier a momma bear and her two cubs were in the area (we saw the picture). We joked about our tent being camouflaged and an animal stepping on our little tent because they couldn't see it. I'm not sure which we worried about more - animals or freezing to death as we slept! When we woke up it was 33 degrees and we had our tent packed and were back in the truck with the heat on in less than 10 minutes.
The following day it snowed, not a lot, but some. We fished, hiked to a natural bridge, saw a lot of geysers (including Old Faithful...that wasn't exactly faithful, but was worth the freezing cold wait...probably didn't help that we had ice cream before heading out to watch it). We also saw several waterfalls, a huge canyon, and animals. The picture below is of the natural bridge. The twins immediately noticed the shape below the bridge looked like the shape of Africa (which made them think about their sister). On Monday when we woke up it was 22 degrees! Thank the Lord, we found a room available at a nearby hotel! We didn't even care if it turned out to be a dump...luckily, it was a really nice hotel!! We fished in the rivers and then headed towards Montana where we're resting in a REALLY nice hotel that has 5 hot tubs, two pools, waterfalls in the lobby...and is less expensive than all the others we've stayed in! The twins say we have to take pictures of this place, too!

This afternoon we will head to Spokane. It's still strange to us that we are actually moving!

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