Yellowstone National Park

We arrived at the North Gate of Yellowstone National Park at 12 noon today - right on schedule. Problem was, we expected to be arriving at the town of West Yellowstone - just outside the West Gate! We obviously took a wrong turn off of I-90 and ended up the north gate instead of West Yellowstone.

So, that meant we had a 90 minute drive through the park pulling the 5th wheel - something I didn't really want, or expect, to do. At first, it was a bit dodgy - very narrow roads, no shoulders, steep hills and switchbacks as we drove through Mammoth Hot Springs, Sheepeater Cliff and Indian Creek. It was very slow going and although there was lots of traffic on the road - we seemed to be the only RV which had us a bit worried.

We passed Roaring Mountain(geysers) and after about 45 minutes we came to a place called Norris. There, thankfully, we came to a junction where the road widened out, had a shoulder and wound down through a lot of flatlands. From there it was a relatively easy drive to Madison and then onto the town of West Yellowstone.

We went straight to the West Yellowstone Grizzly RV Park, registered, and setup in our campsite which is very nice - the whole park is great - even though it doesn't have a swimming pool. We decided to take it easy and not tour anymore of the park today as I wanted to relax a bit after the drive through the park.

That was fine with Paulette as she was raring to go into the town of West Yellowstone and explore all of the shops - it looks like a a very busy town as far as stores and shopping goes. Our RV park is pretty close to the downtown area so I just dropped Paulette off in town and the dogs and I headed back to the RV Park. After a bit of a siesta, we ended up going for a walk on a path through the woods behind our campsite - kind of spooky after a while when you see all the warnings about Grizzly bears etc. But, we made it back alive - just as Paulette returned from town.

The weather was hot today - mid 30's celcius again, but at 8:00pm it is cooling down nicely and we won't need the a/c on tonight.

We are just watching the news on CNN about the freeway bridge collapse in Minneapolis, MN. Kind of eerie because we were in Minneapolis just one week ago tonight. As it turns out we never did go over that particular bridge in Minneapolis but we did go over several others which, luckily for us, never collapsed!

Tomorrow, we are going to do the Yellowstone Loop including Old Faithful Geyser, West Thumb, Yellowstone Lake, Fishing Bridge, Canyon Villiage and a number of other 'must be seen' locations. Hopefully, we'll get some good pics to post tomorrow night!

Aug 1, 2007

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