Yellowstone/Star Valley Trip -Day 1-

Day 1

We started out in the morning and headed toward Yellowstone. We got to Yellowstone right around lunch time. We found a place next to a small section of the Lake. The kids had lots of fun throwing rocks in the water while I got the food ready.

I had a hard time getting Brett away from the water to come eat. He ate a little bit, but I eventually gave up and figured he would eat well for dinner. We had some camp robbers come and clean up the food that the kids had accidentally dropped while they were eating.

Our main goal of the day was to get down to Star Valley today. We made a stop at West Thumb on the way.
Sam is mesmerized by all the thermal activity.

I was really glad to have the monkey leash on this trip, even if a lot of people gave me dirty looks for having my kid on a leash. But when there are warning signs every 20 feet saying not to get off the boardwalk, I would rather have my kid strapped to me. Brett kept trying to jump off and go run around.

He would see all the steam and day, "Hot water! Hot water!"

We had a lot of experience with cultural differences. There were a lot of Asian people in Yellowstone during our trip. They had tour buses throughout the park the whole time. While we were walking around the boardwalk, we had numerous people posing next to us and taking our pictures, even asking to hold our children while they took pictures. It was really weird and interesting, especially to Charlie. He's fascinated by that type of stuff. We were curious as to the reason they wanted to take our picture, but no one spoke English. They knew a few words, like Thank you and Hi. Sam said after one of the women took her picture with him, she said, "You're kind of cute." We had some hypotheses as to why they wanted to take our picture: 1) We were literally some of the only American people in the park, so we were kind of like one of the rarely-seen wildlife. 2) Our kids were so dang cute, they couldn't resist. 3) They're just not used to seeing so many kids in one family.

We walked over to some falls and tried to get a picture with everyone. This was the best we got :)

There was a pretty cool-looking storm on the way out of the park.

A DVD player made the trip a lot easier :)

We stopped in Thayne for the night at Cabin Creek Inn. I was expecting some small, old cabin for the price we were paying. I was pleasantly surprised! It was really cute! It had a small kitchenette in it. It even had a jetted tub!

It was a pretty rough night. The two younger kids didn't want to go to sleep. Sam decided to sleep on the couch in the kitchen area because Amelia's screaming wasn't as loud. She finally went to sleep, but Brett was still awake. He had fallen asleep in the car, so he was wide awake. He finally went to sleep around 11. About 5 minutes late, Amelia woke up. I walked around with her and tried to give her some milk, but she wouldn't quit screaming. I finally put her back in the pack and play and just let her scream. Charlie eventually brought her into bed with him (Brett was in the bed with me), but it didn't help a ton throughout the night. Her crying woke up Brett around 6, so the morning started early.