Future Drea here, still writing from the discomfort of my hostel stay in Moran, Wyoming. I feel like I'm at least 20 years older than Methuselah every morning when I creak and crack my way out of this fucking bed. Derek is sleeping on a side of the bed that isn't snugly on the frame, it hangs over. Like a pot bellied bed. I hope I get a picture before we leave. For posterity!
Today was the day we left for Yellowstone. It was a relatively easy day, we woke up early-ish to get the car packed and headed off to Billings to rockhound in the Yellowstone River. Sunrise in The Black Hills was tremendous.
It is a little jarring to go from desert landscape to lush hills, but you get over it fairly quickly. Or maybe you don't, but I did.
I think it was only a 5 hour drive to Billings. We got to our first spot, a tiny little boat access point under a bridge, and we interrupted the parade of ennui of a very forlorn looking young person sitting on top of a picnic table, staring off into the bleak forever of Billings, Montana.
Derek and I cruised the river bank and all we found was the poached carcass of a buck that smelled unmistakably of rot. I smelled it before I saw it and moved upriver, Derek poked around on the other side, down wind, which....was a choice. I found a couple of nice rocks, Derek found a couple, and we decided to head off to a different location.
We figured that the river being low would give us access to premium pickings, but since we only had 40 minutes, we were mostly disappointed with what was immediately available. We didn't bring any spray bottles, we didn't dig anything up, we just looked for the easiest, most obvious good rocks. Of which there were very few.
Back on the road! We stopped at Costco, got some gas, I went potty, and we continued heading to Yellowstone. The scenery on the way was top notch, honestly. I took so many more photos than I'm going to end up posting (you're welcome. I tallied up the photos from just ONE DAY at Badlands, and it was 452. From just one day).
Oops! All scenery!
The drive was only two and a half hours to the gate, and look. Ok. Sometimes I mess things up. I'm not perfect. I had intended for us to come in through the Silver gate. The NE gate that heads straight into Lamar Valley, it was what put us in a time crunch. Get to Lamar Valley for golden hour, sunset, and blue hour for wildlife photography. We entered through Cody. Through the east gate.
Oh no.
But thankfully, it didn't stop us from seeing wildlife.
Drea from the future is bison'ed out.
One thing that you quickly learn about travelling through Yellowstone (the greater Yellowstone ecosystem, by the way, not just Yellowstone the park)...you always stop to see what people are looking at. We had spotted a few people on the side of the road, did a quick scan, and saw them staring at an elk.
See?
Cool and all, but we didn't deem it worth stopping for. And then we saw our first group of big time lookiloos. We were getting ready to drive by when I looked back and saw what I thought was a wolf on the river bank. I shouted to Derek, "That's a WOLF!" and he said, yup, yup, let's go back! He whipped us around, parked in the parking lot, we got out very excitedly and almost immediately noticed I am not very bright, it was a coyote. But in my defense, it was the healthiest coyote I've ever seen in my life. The tail alone looked fluffy and huge and I can totally vouch for why I thought it was a wolf. No coyote I've seen in all my days looked as healthy as this Yellowstone coyote.
We posted up and watched the coyote hunt for her dinner (she caught three varmints of some larger variety!) for about thirty minutes, and it was the cutest fucking thing. She pounced up and dove down for her supper, very successfully.
The goodest girl.
We had another hour of driving to our hotel, we stayed at Grant Village down in the West Thumb Geyser basin area. It was a beautiful drive, we saw another elk with the biggest antlers, I took a horrible photo of it on my camera, we saw....well, smelled it first...a steam vent outside of our hotel area:
Mmmmm, farty earth!
Derek parked at registration, got us our room stuff, and we could finally rest our heads for the night....on what I then assumed were the most uncomfortable beds in existence.
Our room was really nice, though. Aside from the bed, it was quite cozy and an altogether pleasant place to lay our road weary bodies down for a rest.
Now because this will become a thing for most of the rest of the trip until tomorrow when we get to Estes, I want to be clear about something.
I have ARFID (self diagnosed, but I fit almost the entirety of the criterion). I am a vegetarian, I do not eat processed/added sugar. I don't do wheat or tubers. I follow a VERY strict diet. I have learned through years of traveling and going hungry, or eating things I know I shouldn't if my brain says they're ok and feeling sick, or wasting money because I'm TRYING to eat something but my ARFID won't let me. I spent days making food to bring on this trip. All through the trip, it was fine. I knew Yellowstone was in the deep pockets of Xanterra, and they do not want you eating anything but their food in a major way. I told Derek to contact our lodge and tell them his wife is autistic with ARFID and can we use a microwave every night in one of the common areas? He ran out of time to do that and we just rolled the dice on not bringing our small microwave with us.
Massive mistake.
Derek texts me while he's checking in that it doesn't look good for a microwave for me. When he got back to the car, I learned that microwaves are seasonal ammenities at Yellowstone, and they remove them from even employee use at end of season. There was ONE place for me to gain access to a microwave, at the service station across the street, but they close every day at 5.
So all of the food I had prepared for myself, all of the food Derek had prepared for himself, we had to eat it cold. We called our dinners cold slop. And while we complained just the tiniest bit, there was really very little either of us would have rather been doing than eating cold slop with each other in our little lodge room at Yellowstone.
Cold vegan slop!
We unpacked the car, crawled into bed, and readied ourselves for a 5am wake up call to go take sunrise photos at Lookout Point.
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