The Grand Adventures of a Boy and his Wife: One Grand Adventure: Part 2

For the second day of our trip, we drove...a lot. We drove from Kennebec, SD all the way to Cody, WY. That's 566 miles! We had a lot of ground to cover so we didn't stop all that much that day. We admired the Badlands from I-90 and then stopped in Rapid City for lunch. Elias had been a little wheezy (probably from the tall grass he played in at our campsite), so we looked for somewhere to give him a breathing treatment. We looked for unattended electrical outlets at a couple different locales and ended up at a Flying J truck stop. It was our assumption that no one would ask us any questions there and they didn't. After a quick treatment and grabbing a few supplies, we headed off in search of coffee for Tyler. We ended up eating our picnic lunch outside of Starbucks.

Then we drove on. We had hoped to wait for dinner until Cody but realized that, that would make it a very late meal and stopped in Sheridan, WY instead. The boys ate Wendy's and the girls tried Qdoba for the first time. Then we headed up the pass to Cody. This stretch made us a little nervous, mostly because of the mishap of the previous day. I didn't want to have to clean out our van again. Luckily, our girl seemed to do much better in the middle row and got along just fine through all the twists and turns. Phew!

Once we got to Cody, we headed for our campsite. This was another free site. The website had said that it would be a little difficult to get to (no RVs) but that a car should have no trouble. Once we got to the base of the road headed to the site, I realized that it was taking us up a mountain. We attempted the road but chickened out when we scraped bottom and decided to make camp in a parking area at the base of the mountain. When we set up, we weren't really sure if it was okay for us to camp there but by the next morning, two other groups had joined us so I guess it was fine.

This is our rather desolate campsite at the base of the mountain. Tyler and I didn't sleep very well this night either. It was SUPER windy. There had been wind during the thunderstorm the night before but nothing like this wind. I was really afraid the whole thing was going to come down or that we all might blow away at some points during the night. And then there was the issue of the deflating air mattress. Our air mattress decided to slowly leak all night so that at one point we were folded in half with our bottoms about a half an inch of the ground (our air mattress is double thick). About halfway through the cold, windy, wilty night, Tyler couldn't stand it any longer and decided to reinflate the air mattress. With a reinflated mattress, we both slept much better and were very pleased to see that the mattress was still fully inflated in the morning. I had been in charge of inflating the air mattress while we set up and I didn't realize that there was two parts to the valve. Needless to say, I didn't tighten one part and we had a slow leak all night. Luckily, we didn't have a hole and I didn't repeat that mistake for the rest of the trip.

The kids after night two. Albert was sleeping directly on the cold, hard ground.

Fresh coffee without boiling over!

We left from Cody and had about an hour drive to Yellowstone. We knew we needed to get there early if we wanted to get a campsite so we left as soon as we were able the next morning. In talking to a park ranger, we learned that the campsites usually fill about the same time as they did the day before. According to the hotline, all the campsites had filled by noon the day before we got there so we were hoping to get to Yellowstone well before then to secure a campsite in the actual park. When we entered the park (from the East Entrance) we learned that there were 3 sites still open, one to the south and two by the north entrance. Taking our odds we headed north. We enjoyed getting our first glimpses of Yellowstone as we willed tourists to drive faster and scoot over while they stopped to look at the wildlife. We hurried, hurried, hurried only to get stuck in construction in that lovely yellow highlighted area just north of Norris. As we made it to the first of the two sites up north, we saw that it was already full so we hurried on to the next. "No stopping for pictures of that elk because we must get a campsite!" We arrived at the last campsite only to discover that it had filled more than 45 minutes before we got there, nearly two hours earlier than it had filled the day before. We hardly had a chance. We were bummed.

This is where our very bummed group set up for a picnic and tried to figure out what plan B would be. Luckily, we found a campsite just outside Yellowstone and reserved a spot over the phone. That made our picnic much happier, even after a quick shower came through and sent us all running to our van for a few moments. See they are all happily eating again. Yes, Addilyn, do you have a question?

Here is our campsite just outside of Yellowstone. We weren't thrilled with how cramped things were there or with the fact that the caretaker yelled at us within moments of us getting there but they did have showers and it was a spot. We set up our tent and set out to explore the wonders of Yellowstone. Let's go!

Our first stop was Mammoth Hot Springs.

Albert is definitely falling in this picture.

And here he is "shading his eyes" like Asher.

These were interesting. They were a bit smelly from all the sulfur and we kept walking through clouds of warm, humid air. They were fun to look at and the kids were so glad to be out of our van. Yay!