At long last, we arrived in Minnesota. But where are all my Minnesota photos? I have just four? This is the problem with writing blogs two years after your road trip…
Here’s a couple photos of Adelaide playing in the giant sandbox.
Here’s one of Hazel eating sand.
We watched a glass blowing demonstration. This here is called a glory hole.
I’ve got to find more photos…
We packed up camp early in the morning and headed to Yellowstone National Park. We drove through the Roosevelt Arch at the North Entrance and paid the $30 entrance fee, which felt like a lot of money to me, but divided by 5, it’s only $6 per person, which isn’t a bad deal to experience mostly-unspoiled nature.
Once inside, we were greeted by deer. Now we had seen deer before, of course, but these deer were different. Regular deer seem to sneak around like fugitives, guiltily freezing in the headlights or fleeing to safety. But in Yellowstone, they own the place. Cars stop to let them cross the road, and they take their time doing it.
We parked the car. We weren’t prepared for the cold, so we piled on as many clothes as we had. Except for Kyle, who wore his short shorts.
Our first visit was to one of the travertine terraces, all steamy and steppy.
There’s a lot of steam in Yellowstone, which really adds to the mysticalness. It’s like God’s fog machine.
Next we checked out the prismatic springs, deep holes in the ground with boiling hot water. They have organisms living in them that make the water look yellow, green and blue. Very beautiful, and yet I kept thinking about how terrible it would be to fall in.
These are tiny geysers, constantly spurting hot water and steam.
This is Kyle, looking like a German tourist.
There are a lot of dead trees in the thermal areas of Yellowstone. Behind the branches is one of the Artist’s Paint Pots. From the name, I expected these to be different colors, but they’re just white. It looks like white boiling paint. Which is pretty cool, if you’re not mislead by the name. I’m just saying, what kind of artist only uses white paint? House Painter’s Paint Pots is more like it.
This was an amazing view of a bunch of thermal hot spots. It felt like we were driving into Oz.
Leaving the park was a little like walking down Main Street before leaving Disneyland. You’re saying goodbye to this magical, protected place and going out into the real world, where not everything is clean and beautiful. I mean, in Yellowstone, you can point your camera just about anywhere and get amazing photos. It makes me wonder what all of this land looked like to the pioneers.
No doubt, Yellowstone is a special place, and I’m glad Teddy Roosevelt had the foresight to protect it. We spent a day in the park and saw less than half of it, but we left inspired and determined to return next year.
With only our headlights to guide us, we had no idea where we’d landed. We knew we were close to the water. An imposing barge eerily drifted past us in the dark. The sand was soft, so we rolled out our sleeping bags right on the beach. As always, I was scared of wild animals, but I got sleep in here and there.
We woke up in this magical place.
We made lots of stops on the way out to take photos. The place looked straight out of a calendar.
We were sad to leave such beauty, but we were looking forward to spending the afternoon in Seattle.
Every year, when it starts warming up after winter (we had some chilly 50 degree days!), my mind starts turning to summer, when we’ll hit the road for our annual summer roadtrip. We’ve done the trek from CA to MN two or three times now, and it seems like I never get around to posting the pictures. So in honor of the warmer weather, and in anticipation of our next trip, here are some photos from Summer Vacation 2015:
We started out by visiting family in Thousand Oaks and had a surprisingly restful night on two twin beds pushed together.
Next stop: Atwater, to visit Kyle’s grandma and other kin. Great-grandma gave Augie an apple to play Mr. Apple Head.
Then we went up to Sacramento to stay with Kyle’s parents for a few days and prepare for our big trip.
We did some thrift store shopping, but our best find was this truck:
We got to go to Tahoe with Kyle’s brother’s fam. Always a good time, even when the lake is less than full.
We traveled to South Lake Tahoe to see Kyle’s cousin and her fam, too. We got to see their new place. Here’s Kyle with baby Hazel and baby Olive:
We spent a beautiful day at the beach with cousins and second cousins. (Or is it first cousins once removed?)
We popped into a thrift store before leaving Tahoe. While I tried on dresses, Adelaide sank herself into a beanbag chair with a book about pirates. We bought a few things, and the shopkeeper said we could take the book with us, too. I never would’ve picked out “Piratepedia” for her, but that book was the unlikely hero of her trip, keeping the kids’ interest for the whole 4,000 mile round trip.
We said goodbye to family and officially set off on our adventure. We got to the Sequoia National Forest in the late afternoon and found a campsite.
This was our first big trip with our Land Cruiser and she made herself right at home up there in the mountains.
We spent one very cold night under a million stars and a bright shining moon and awoke to a pink-orange dawn.
We were the first ones to Sequoia National Park and enjoyed a quiet walk in the woods, just us and the deer.
We posed with General Sherman.
We looked at fallen trees.
On Sunday, we visited Bethel Church. It was over 100 degrees that day, and we had to turn on the heater as we climbed through the hills into Oregon to keep the engine cool. We hit Portland at night and drove straight through to our free campsite at Jones Beach.