Ha! I'm talking about bison here... we've been wondering if bison and buffalo are the same? I have some research to do.
Today we leave Yellowstone and head for Cody, Wyoming, home of Buffalo Bill, and more importantly for Cork, Jackson Pollock. Yellowstone has actually been relaxing even with all of its crowds. The first day in the park we spent a couple of hours at Mammoth Hot Springs, walking the miles of walkways around what once were active hot springs, and now but for a few are steamy patches of history. The few that were active were AMAZING. I don’t know if you’ll be able to tell from the picture, but there’s a dragonfly that somehow landed in the heated water and died, leaving a beautiful calcified reminder of why you shouldn’t stick your body parts in the water!!! (Science word of the day is “thermophiles.” Thermophiles are heat-loving organisms that live in the springs)
I’ll warn you now, the hot springs are NOT a good place for menopausal women to be walking around on a hot day. OMG, standing there with steam rising and everyone oohing and ahhing and all I can do is hot flash and hot flash and hot flash. Then I read a sign that says “Toxic Gases exist in Yellowstone. Dangerous levels of hydrogen sulfide and carbondioxide have been measured in some hydrothermal areas. If you feel sick, leave the location immediately.” And I think “How am I going to know if it’s my own personal summer on hyperdrive or if it’s the toxic gases?” Luckily it clouded over and started to sprinkle before I had to find out.
Loggerheads
Locking Horns
Impasse
Knucklehead micspasitron (per Lily)
Cottenheadded ninnymuggen
Cork and I have been wrestling with how the rest of the trip should unfold. We know if we try to do the entire route we had planned it will mean most if not all days we have to spend a few hours driving. We know that this means there is no time to just relax and not plan. We know this entire trip was about relaxing and not planning. We know this means one of us has to give up the most important part of the trip for that person. Cork’s highlight destination is Bay of Fundy, New Brunswick, off the tip of the east coast. My highlight destination is New Orleans. We can’t do both. Of course, to me, my destination point makes more sense. Cork’s son and grandsons live in Orlando, Florida. I’m meeting my sisters in Orlando to celebrate my little sister’s 50th birthday (how weird is it when your “younger” sibling turns 50???) From Orlando we just toodle over to New Orleans where there’s a potential surprise waiting for Lily.
To Cork, the entire trip is for naught if we don’t go to the Bay of Fundy. Anyone who knows Cork knows he can be, ummm, what’s the word I’m looking for??? Childish? (yeah, I know I can be, too) and the thought of having him upset, depressed, negative for the next few weeks does not sit well with me. I have the luxury of thinking that because my destination highlight makes more sense! To me, if we don’t do the southern route we have to incur the cost of me flying to Orlando for my sister’s birthday, we miss seeing Cork’s family, and perhaps a really cool moment in New Orleans will be missed. Oh yeah, and I will probably be pissy for a few days.
So this is when Cork and I have to exercise our true adulthood and come to a rational decision. We have to make sure that before we move ahead on our new route, that whomever it is who has to give up their highlight destination will be able to do so willingly and with the least amount of drama. Oooohhhh, this is going to be a tough one!
We just set up camp in Cody, Wyoming after an AMAZING day driving through Yellowstone to the east entrance and then down to Cody. We entered Yellowstone through the north, camped in the town of West Yellowstone, and I have to say that the drive east was the most scenic, beautiful, radical landscape yet. I have to tell you, I was TERRIFIED to go over the pass. It's called Sylvan Pass and it's about 8600 feet. I have a vivid, yet vague on details memory of taking a trip with my family when I was young. We were going over a pass somewhere in the Rockies, and our station wagon broke down on the side of the road that had a 500+ drop. There were six kids in this station wagon and we were all freaking out and I was in the back pretending to be dead so if we dropped over the side I'd already be gone. Obviously we made it. Today when I knew we were going over a pass (something that I should have "gotten" earlier, yes?) I started to panic. I figured I'd go back and get in bed and pretend I was gone, just in case. Well, I'm happy to report we made it! The pass was nowhere near as intense as what I remembered (possibly because this range of mountains, the Tetons, is the youngest range of the Rockies.)
After wending our way through the mountains and into Wyoming, through countryside that provoked memories long forgotten (a paper contrasting Picasso's Guernica with Goya; Betty Bettiker, my dad's secretary... go figure) we landed at the Buffalo Bill Center, which houses five museums. We visited the museum on the Plains Indians, which was incredible, and the Buffalo Bill museum, equally incredible from a historical perspective but not as big of a WOW factor. We are now making bean soup for dinner, doing homework, and catching up on life in general...
