There are no bears in the sky: National Parks Trip day 5

Drea from the future here! We should be qualifying today as our last day of the national parks trip, but it won't be, and I'll talk about thaton the actual day. I feel a little ill today, not sure why, my stomach is greasy and I  have a vague nausea settled in the back of my throat that isn't upfront and persistent, but there JUUUUUUUUUST enough to be annoying. I am writing this while Derek packs everything so we can leave our hotel in Estes and head for Kansas City. This is how tired I've been during this trip...trying to blog every day has been an unrelenting fatigue demon. Which is 100% the mark of an excellent trip. 

This is our last day in Yellowstone, and it meant exploring the bottom loop of the Grand Loop. We hadn't really specified where we wanted to do sunrise photos on the grand loop...I have vaguely gestured toward sunrise over Yellowstone lake, which is absolutely beautiful, but Derek...and I, honestly...weren't really enamored with that location. So we just kinda bickered about where to go and then headed over to Old Faithful. I had to go to the inn, anyway, so might as well start there. 

It is SO active over there. Not with people, with hydrothermal action. Looking at like, 80% of the park, I forget we were on a super busy volcanic minefield just bursting...literally...with energy. We drove by a field of vents...fumeroles?...and wondered, "is this place for us for sunrise?"

Nope.

While the smoke in the foreground was interesting, there was no real discernment for a cool background, so we pressed on toward the Old Faithful Inn. Not with necessary intention, just because like...there's only one way to go on Grand Loop road away from our hotel. 

When we got to the inn, I had to take pictures of all of it because I was worried my dad wouldn't believe that I had gone to the inn if I didn't have proof. My dad seemed to really love the Old Faithful Inn, and being frank, I could have left the entire wing of the Grand Loop that has Old Faithful...and its inn...behind and not missed it. But here I am!

Just for you, daddy!

We didn't see much in the way of scenery (all offense, Old Faithful. Have you see the rest of the park? Get it together), but we DID see a few bison posted up in front of a hill of fumeroles, so that's where we made our sunrise location. 

Wow, she said.

He said wow, too, but I think he meant it more. 

We had about fifteen minutes to sunrise, and I got really bored with where we were about five minutes prior. I know I sound like an unappreciative monster, and I suppose that's fine by me, but like...some things are just not my jam. I like dramatic landscapes, and while this landscape IS dramatic, the drama for me personally is in understanding what's going on there. Just looking at it doesn't look dramatic to me, it looks humid. Derek was having the grandest of times, and he is tons and tons more patient about wildlife photography and landscape photography than I am, so I packed up my shit and wandered over to Old Faithful itself.

So old. So faithful. 

It didn't seem quite primed to go off, though what do I know? I've never seen it, so I wouldn't really know what an indicator of it being ready is. I walked over to the inn to check out my dad's seeming favorite feature of it, the stone chimney. 

What a place!

This door is confusing to open inside, I needed to wait for someone to open it for me. I'm not proud. 

See, daddy? I really went inside and looked around because you said I should.

....somehow I don't think that's been updated this morning.

I walked through their gift shops, which open WAY earlier than any other gift shop in the park. I assume it's because this is the most popular place to stay, so they have to make that sweet sweet visitor cash for as many hours as possible. They did have a really fantastic spot full of King Kuka's art, and I ALMOST bought one of his embossed lithographs, but it felt REALLY slimy buying a Blackfeet piece from Yellowstone and not knowing if his estate got entirely hosed when it sold his prints to everywhere they sold them. I told Derek I would much rather know I'm directly supporting an artist/their tribe instead of a third party. That goes for any artist, but especially minoritized artists. ESPECIALLY when those minoritized artists are fetishized the way that indigenous artists are. There were so many like, icky reproductions of like...blankets (yikes), weapons (yikes again), dream catchers (tired AND yikes), and I did not want to help Yellowstone cash in on that kind of appropriative white nonsense. I did see a lot of artist spotlights that highlighted indigenous artists making the collections being sold, but I also know that a LOT of AI slop shit is marketed this same way online and maybe I'm paranoid, but I don't necessarily believe that Yellowstone the park is engaging in best practices with what they buy up and sell off.  

I went back outside, saw that Derek was stll photographing bison...who were MUCH closer to him now, and he had been joined by two park rangers to monitor the safety of the bison and advise guests to leave the area if necessary...and decided I would make an earnest go of trying to get a good wildlife shot. 

Hopefully something from this series turns out. 

I think Derek was doing his photographs for another 30 or so minutes before the rangers were like, ok, now it's time to go. Derek told me the conversations he'd been having with the park rangers, I believe one of them was either present or a responder when the dude got gored earlier this year, and it was only her second year as a ranger. I bought Vivi a book called Deaths in Yellowstone, and I'm kinda excited to read it after she does. 

Derek and I packed it in and drove off to Grand Prismatic Spring, where our hike for the day was located. We were going to do the overlook, of course, and then we were going to do Fairy Falls. I was worried we had showed up a little late for parking, since this is THE big ticket item besides Old Faithful, and when we stopped to photograph the overview of Grand Prismatic field, I was even more worried we were losing our spot. 

Time wasters, both of us! There's an overlook to see!!!

We made it to Grand Prismatic, but it really was packed, and we had to park in the overflow lot in one of the very last parking spaces available. What's a longer walk to a trailhead when you're planning a six miler, though? Nothing. So off we headed. Again, just gonna out myself as a geyser hater, it was pretty here, but not my kind of pretty.

So cool.

I know I'm the worst, and likely pretty alone in my ambivalence about what I was looking at. Like, I get the awe inspiring nature of the nature, but I would rather look at something else. However, the overlook for Grand Prismatic really is undersold by any photo I've ever seen of it. 

Including my own. 

I do hope some of those photos turn out, as well, because tthat really is an incredible sight. It was the most moved and impressed I was this side of the grand loop, full disclosure. It was so packed up there, and so warm, I had to move off of the platform and go sit down in the shade to have my own little private panic attack. Derek came down about ten minutes later, and we hiked off to Fairy Falls. Which was a lovely, very easy hike to the falls, I was thrilled to shout out the occasional, "HEY BEAR!" in earnest, and the falls were so pretty. 

I actually started my photos of Fairy Falls way further back on the trail, mostly because I wanted a lot of variety here to ensure that ONE photo turns out. Have I mentioned I am a pretty shit landscape photographer? I've popped off a few good ones, but it's more about luck than skill. Landscapes just aren't want I'm interestedin photographing, so my patience for making sure I get the shot is extremely thing. If I get it, I get it, if I don't, I don't, and I'm not terribly pressed about it either way. I do my best, but it isn't like when I'm working where I can see the images and I can see what I'm doing and I know the vision. I'm just kinda flying by vague direction with landscapes. So if one of these comes out, yay! If they don't, oh well. 

It was a busier trail than I had been expecting, though it was far from a rush of people. I think we saw ten people, maybe twelve? But I had been expecting to top out at 6. We hung out here for maybe 30-ish minutes, I tried a bunch of vantages, and I have yet to look and see if anything I did was successful. 

Next we headed over to the artist paint pots, which Derek had been the most excited about. The parking lot was PACKED, the boardwalks were packed, and I didn't see a pathway for us to visit those paint pots. Derek thinks I did that to him on purpose, which is a rancid thing to think, it was just genuinely full to the brim, it had a LOT FULL sign, and I knew there were more paint pots up the way to go see that weren't going to be as busy. Derek said he knew I didn't care about those paint pots so I didn't make them important, but that's super far from the truth. I DID make those important because they were important to him. It just wasn't in the cards. But the next paint pots were. Derek had a puss on about these paint pots and didn't even seem to really enjoy seeing them (they were pretty subpar paint pots, coming from a hydrothermic activity hater that may seem like a given, but only one of them was farting up stuff and isn't that what this section of the park is all about?). The little park WAS neat, though. It was the best mix of what I like at Yellowstone and what Derek likes. 

Mr. Puss.

And really, that was kind of it for the day. We had a long drive back to the hotel to eat our cold slop, Derek was really tired, and who can blame him? We had had a very busy day.

Thank you to my Garmin Overlords for keeping track of me!

I think Derek fell asleep at like, 5:45 for a light nap, and it turned into Derek Went To Sleep For The Night at 5. I stayed up and ate my cold slop and blogged, and I think I went to sleep at about 9. The next day's adventure is leaving for Grand Teton and moving on to the absolute WORST hotel stay of my ever existence. 

There are no bears in the sky: National Parks Trip day 4

I remember attending a party in my super late teens where I drank a bunch and fell asleep on a garage floor, and I woke up feeling the most refreshed and rested. A garage floor. 

In my twenties, even after having had two children, I could part all weekend, doing drugs, smoking weed, drinking booze, and get the best sleep of my life passing out on the stairs of my own townhouse. 

I am 42 now and I am super baby bear about shit. If it isn't JUUUUUUUUUUUUST right, my body...and my mouth....are going to loudly complain about it. That bed at Grant Lodge was fucking heinous, and for 352 dollars a night I expected WAY fucking better bed quality. 350 dollars a night gets me the fucking Mining Exchange and dinner at Mackenzies in the springs. I almost would have rather slept in my car. And to top it all off, we woke up at 5am. In a shit bed. In a nice room. In one of the most beautiful locations in America. I need to grow up. 

A groggy Derek and Drea stumbled through getting gear and clothes and selves collected, and out the door we went to make the hour drive to the grand canyon of Yellowstone. 

Cold cold cold. 

We drove to Lookout point and I was wildly surprised to find the parking lot empty. I was sure we would be joined by one or two photographers. 

Not a single one. Not until after sunrise. 

Oh no! Beaultiful solitude!

Beautiful solitude with bonus handsome companion. 

I was absolutely fucking feezing my tits and tail off, it was I think 30 degrees out. We were weather gear appropriate, but I have Raynaud's Syndrome (thanks, POTS and EDS!) and it makes my hands and especially my fingers HURT and they get all ugly colored and it sucks, but listen. Listen listen listen. It was so worth it. I don't even think I got anything super great from this shoot, but I would do it all over again, with the same quality of photos, in a heartbeat. 

I mean come on. 

At sunrise, Lookout Point was swarmed with a tour of just the nicest people who kept apologizing to Derek and I for being in our way, which they absolutely were not, and apologizing for so politely asking us if we would mind getting out of their way for just a moment. I was like, "girl say less, I don't own this, it belongs to all of us! Take your time!" and they were so appreciative like I had done something super magnaimous when really, all I had done was get out of THEIR way. 

I think we were there for a total of an hour? Maybe an hour and a half? I got "bored" of trying to get a great photo of the falls, I figured I either got it or I didn't, continuously pushing the shutter button for another twenty minutes wasn't going to change that. So I wandered around the viewing area and took a ton of photos of the canyon. It is just stunning. Derek and I drove through the rest of the one way drive and stopped at all of the pull offs to take another look. Each one a winner. We didn't do the North Rim trail because honestly we didn't have the time. Yellowstone is unfathomably large. I had really wanted to do the North Rim trail, though, and I was kind of disappointed that we wouldn't have the time to do it. 

Which is why our next activity is going to sound so stupid. 

A few weeks back, though Derek swears we've known about this for years, I stumbled upon a reddit thread of people talking about National Parks Passports because I wanted to find a way to log all of the parks that Derek and I have been to together, and the parks I've been to in general. More the parks we've been to together. Mortality starts knocking at your door at 42, I don't know, I j ust want to posterity the big time shit we do. So anyway, there are these things called National Parks Passports. You get cancellation stamps each time you visit visitor's centers in any national park, and you collect all of the cancellations for everywhere you've been. Like a regular travel passport, but nerdier. 

Obviously I wanted one. I didn't think Derek would be into it, but he is also into it in a major way. At Badlands, we went to the visitor center to buy our passports, and found them closed for inventory (boo. BOO!), so our first day in Yellowstone, we had to get our passports. We drive to the first visitor's center near us, and while we waited for them to open, we walked into a gift shop. A Xanterra gift shop. This is where we decided to grab all of our stuff for the trip. We ourselves aren't really big on souvenirs, we don't do the tshirts or the hats or the anything like that. I get a magnet from everywhere we go, and we usually grab the kids something of the unusual-er trinket variety. I got Vivi a book, I got Rhyann huckleberry waffle mix and huckleberry syrup...or jam, I can't recall. We didn't get anything for Laurel because her birthday was four days from...then...and we figured we'd just send her birthday cash, and I very validly feared any gift we bought her as a souvenir would just sit unsent in our kitchen. Just like the big wooden postcard I bought for my dad and Caryn that Derek turned into a magnet. It's been sitting, waiting to be sent, for ages. Had we opted to get Laurel a something, she would have been tricky to find a non-typical souvenir for. I would have had to ask her for help, and that's kinda crap. Anyway. One thing Derek and I DO go nuts for is local boozes. If a place we visit has a whisky or a rum or a gin, we usually grab it, especially if it has a nice label. We almost never open them, they're commemorative. We bought Grand Prismatic Run and two Yellowstone shot glasses. All of this pales in comparison to getting our Parks Passports. 

Now. 

The Xanterra gift shop workers were very nice. I asked if they sold the passports, they told me they didn't and we would have to go across the street to Yellowstone Forever. But they did have their own version! And the clerk I was talking to showed it to me. And I LOVED IT. I ended up buying it for myself. But there was only one, so Derek didn't get the cute one I bought. He had been holding out hope for the Colletor's Edition in the big binder, the hugely expensive one that was for the super park nerd with a compulsion for oderly collection units. Unfortunately, all Yellowstone Forever had was the dinkiest version. The introductory version. The craphound one. 

Mine is cuter. 

But it didn't really matter, we finally had a place to put our cancellation stamps!! And boy did we ever get involved in this. It turns out, there are also regional stamps you can collect....Derek went this route...and art travel stamps you can collect....I went this route. 

The stamp may be pretty, but my passport book sucks way less. 

If you've never been to Yellowstone, or never gotten cancellation stamps from national parks, just know there are a lot. So grabbing all of the cancellation stamps was a sidequest of ours that...speaking strictly for myself...I greatly enjoyed. Even now, I'm tickled going into national whatever whatevers and finding stamps. A lady at the superintendent's office of the Rangers of Bridger-Teton National Forest (who had the most chaotic bisexual energy of anybody I've ever met) remarked on Derek and I being cancellation collectors and she's the first person who didn't look exhausted by us stamping our stuff. But that's Drea from the future stuff. 

Derek and Drea of the recent past got busy with seeing as much of Yellowstone as they could. We opted to do the u pper half of the park the first day, so we cut across the middle of Grand Loop and headed upwards toward Mammoth and Gardiner. We stopped at every little pull off of interest to us.

The Roaring Mountain Fumaroles!

This waterfall!

This scenic byway!

After driving that very scenic byway, we saw a gentleman on the side of the road flagging down drivers, and we were the only people who stopped. It turns out, he just wanted to show people a mountain goat on the side of the cliff. Derek saw it, I did not. I sat in the car and ruminated about how the idea of god really cheapens the idea of natural beauty. Like, if some god figure created all of this, well...that's just a great imagination. I have that. God isn't all that special if god is just imaginative. Yellowstone is just me having to marvel at what some other person did if god exists, and like, earth as a kind of curated museum is as boring as any other museum if you think of it that way. Sure it's cool to look at, and incredible to see the breadth of what's achievable, but...it's stuff we're all capable of doing? Looking at any gorgeous scenery and thinking some god made it really cheapend and flattens the impact. But if you look at earth like I do...like no god exists and this all just...happened because cosmic conditions were just so and shit just blammo'ed itself into existance and exploded and collided and died off and lived in different ways to get to the point where I am sitting in my car ruminating on how god makes Yellowstone boring....THAT is something to marvel at. THAT is something that's incredible and amazing. God as designer? Boo. Cosmic and chaotic non-intention? That option is better. 

Derek chatted with the sheep guy for about twenty minutes while I chewed on how many ways it makes everything suck to believe in god(s), and then we got back on our way to Mammoth. We stopped at the Upper Terraces and did the boardwalk.

The absolute strangeness of this specific place is matched only by its splendor. I do love taking strange tree photos, I've got quite the little series going, so as I was taking a picture of the strange trees in the upper terraces, I chatted with a young man named Hasan, sent him to go talk to Derek about camera gear (I am not a gear head), and Derek befriended him and chatted with him and traded info with him, and I have to get some of that info from him so I can send him the photo he took with my camera. 

I think what I enjoyed most about the boardwalks was the signage. 

I read an account...I cannot verify how true this is...about a man who died in Yellowstone after trying to get someone's dog who jumped into a pool. His last words were, "I shouldn't have done that". David Alan Kirwin is the guy I was thinking of, and I was ALMOST correct about what his last words were reported to be. 

Spoiler: we did a very good job at not falling in to anything. 

After Mammoth Hot Springs, we headed to the Mammoth Visitor Center and went to the Roosevelt Arch so I could grab a picture. 

I didn't get out to get a picture of the cornerstone, but I wanted a picture of the arch because I think, out of every single thing the US Goverment has done, national parks are our saving grace. It's the best of what we've accomplished in spite of every nasty thing underneath it. All of the land theft, all of the murder, all of the recklessness with the land and its resources...national parks are a hint that we're not entirely monstrous, and we know some things are sacred and precious and worth preserving. 

And then, you know, we had to indulge in buying Derek's second passport book. Because gravitas never lasts long. 

Derek did eventually find his binder edition once we got to Grand Tetons, but I vetoed that. Two of these is just fine. 

We got our stamps, I grabbed a Junior Ranger booklet (bad news from the future, I did not finish it. They make you do a LOT! But I CAN finish it and mail it in to get my badge, will I fully intend to do), and we headed out to Lamar Valley. For real this time. We stopped at Undine Falls, and as much as I wanted to do that trail, it was ten miles and again...Yellowstone is just so massive that two days is really only enough time to drive to everything and do short little bursts of walking around. Lava Trail to Undine Falls is ten miles, and we did not have that kind of time. 

It was very pretty, though. It would have been great to hike down and see it from the bottom. Well. Oh well. We weren't quite to Lamar Valley, I don't really know where we were, but we saw a huge herd of bison hanging out by a lake, so we stopped to ogle them. 

I have several minutes of video of watching them run by us and congregate further up around the lake, and that's just such a cool, scary thing to experience. Bison are HUGE and they are noisy and their regular bison noises sound threatening and it is just so neat to be around for their natural behaviors. 

I think we hung around here for about thirty minutes before the park rangers cleared them all out to the other side of the road to unstop the traffic (we never did get caught in a bison jam, we always stopped on purpose and stayed to take photos. Lucky us!), and we kept on truckin' to Lamar Valley. But...by the time we had driven through Lamar for about twenty minutes, Derek and I pretty much simultaneously said we didn't really want to keep going through there, we wanted to turn around and drive back through Hayden Valley. 

So we did. 

And it paid off. 

We saw a mated pair of bald eagles hunt, kill, and tear apart a duck. 

Derek got the kill shot:

I got the ripping shot:

and we both got to be in awe of how amazing and brutal animals are. 

A gentleman with a very huge camera lens came up and chatted with us and told us he had been coming for 15 years to Yellowstone for animal photos and this had been his worst fall season yet, and then told Derek and I to come back in early May when babies are out and plentiful. We stuck that little fact in our cap for later. 

Derek and I had talked about going out for milky way photos somewhere on Lake Yellowstone, and I had previously been entirely game, but I said I had changed my mind, would Derek mind taking me back to the lodge? He didn't mind at all, so we went back to the lodge, Derek put on a movie for me on the laptop and left, and within 15 minutes I was out for the night. At 6:45pm. And I didn't wake up until 5am the next morning when we had to leave for sunrise photos at Old Faithful. Derek did get some lovely milky way shots, and he told me how eerie it is to hear elk bugling at night when you're alone in the dark, even when you know what the sound is. I'll have to post one of his photos in the photo wrap up I do at the end of all of my travel blogs. 

A successful day four if I've ever had one! 

There are no bears in the sky: National Parks trip day 3

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.