After breakfast, we packed up and climbed into the van to do it all over again. Look at what just our first day on the
road looked like:
We headed southeast from our hotel in Butte to Bozeman to visit The Museum of the Rockies. It's a fairly small museum,
but it seems pretty well directed towards kids, which was perfect for our crew. It has 3 exhibits - one on dinosaurs,
one on Yellowstone, and one on Da Vinci. The kids loved the dinosaurs, they had some super interesting displays. There
was even someone working on chiseling out a fossil and she stopped to come out and talk to us for a few minutes about
what she was doing, how she does it, etc. For the Yellowstone exhibit, I can't tell you anything about it really. We
pretty much just ran through it to get to the Da Vinci exhibit (which was way cooler than the Yellowstone one). The Da
Vinci exhibit had a ton of his inventions recreated and setup at various stations that the kids could try using, and
there were also pictures of his notebook with the designs. It was pretty interesting, and the kids had fun playing with
everything. Here are a couple quick pictures.
We made lunch in the shade of a tree sitting in the parking lot and then hit the road once more, further south and east.
We drove along the winding Yellowstone River for what felt like a very long time, ending up in Mammoth, Wyoming, in
Yellowstone. There were SO MANY PEOPLE, I was pretty surprised. I was even more surprised when we found some pretty
sweet parking up close to the main stairs for the hot springs. I think I probably heard 10 different languages on our
brief walk up to the Palette Spring:
To keep things interesting, we decided to drive East through Yellowstone rather than backtracking, and I'm very glad we
did. We went East toward Tower Junction, and then got on the 212. We looped back into Montana briefly to go through
Silver Gate and Cook City, and then back into Wyoming for what felt like ages. Along the way, we saw lots and lots and
LOTS of wildlife. Deer, elk, foxes, a coyote carrying around his dinner, hundreds of bison, even bears. It was pretty
incredible and the kids were very excited.
Back in Montana, we went through the Beartooth Pass, which was pretty exciting. There was still snow (ice, really) all over the ground in July, and there were sooo many twists and turns on a rather narrow road that stretched up one side of the mountains and down the other for miles. Somewhere toward the bottom of the far side of the pass, "T" let us know that he thought he was going to throw up, so we got him the handy car puke bag just in time. Let me tell you, "Z"'s incident yesterday was just getting us warmed up for today. Luckily, they all made it into the bag, but he threw up 6 times as of 11pm tonight. The poor guy! He definitely thinks he feels better than he really does though, because he wanted to eat some chicken nuggets, fries, and chocolate milk. That wasn't happening!
We made it to Red Lodge and toured the main drag which has seen better days. It looks like it was hit pretty hard from some of the Yellowstone flooding last year. There are several buildings full of debris and there are entire streets closed, filled with rubble and river rock. We topped off at the Sinclair gas station (with the cute little green dinosaur out front), drove through a 5 minute rain storm, and then finally made it to our hotel. We got all 5 kids through the bath/shower and washed down a handful of dirt from their overnight camping trip. "C" had rocks in her hair, of course! We just got everyone settled in for the night and we're pooped, but ready for more tomorrow. More what, you ask? Why, more Montana of course! 3 days of Montana is more than I bargained for!