So Derek and I are 16 days away from our trip, and we've been pretty deadlocked on moving forward with an itinerary. Not because we can't agree on anything, but because we've been super duper busy. This weekend I started the push toward getting our shit locked in again, so I'm back on my type A bullshit.
We have eliminated Devil's Tower from our itinerary and swapped it for rockhounding in Billings. The Yellowstone River is a premium site for rockhounding agates and petrified wood, two things we both love, so we're going to skip out on Devil's Tower and spend two hours on the yellowstone river instead. The Yellowstone days are the ones I cannot fucking figure out, Literally every day in Grand Tetons I know what we're doing, and every day in RMNP I know what we're doing. We opted to spend the night in Kansas City instead of doing the twelve hours home in one day, and I even know what I want to do while we're in Kansas fucking City. It's just these two...well, one now..and a half days at Yellowstone. The park is so unfathomably big, and I'm not even in it yet.
I've been trying to figure out how to navigate the largeness, and I'm not necessarily overwhelmed, but I am a bit more lost than I usually find myself when planning a trip. Even traveling entire islands wasn't as hard as this has been. Hawai'i big island and Maui were a comparative breeze. So here's where we're at so far:
I've tried rotating that three times and it just keeps reverting to its sideways position. I'm leaving it this way now.
I have another page with proposed stops:
I'm looking up all of the falls first. Derek is most excited about the geysers, and honestly I could ignore all of them the entire trip and be fine. He is also super excited to see the paint pots, so I'm excited to see those with him because it's the thing he's talked about revisiting the most. Biscuit Basin is closed, so I may not get to see Mystic Falls, which was pretty high on my list, and the one big geothermal pool I WAS excited to see, Sapphire Pool, is in Biscuit Basin and we can't see it now. So that's a big time boooooooooooooooo from me.
I am trying to plot out our itinerary using this handy dandy map:
And it's mostly helpful, but it doesn't seem to be as detailed as it could be about all of the possible stops and hikes and things. I've been tits deep in my AllTrails app looking for hikes (so far I know I want to do Lava Trail and Fairy Falls and Mystic Falls, if able, but other than boardwalks around geothermal basins, I'm not positive of any other hikes we might be missing out on because again...the map is just kinda...sparse) and that's more of a slog than one can imagine.
My charmed life is so hard.
Sixteen days out from our leave date. Our bear sprays arrive Tuesday. My vegan jerky arrived last week. I'm maping out our itinerary. I'm figuring out what foods to bring. Derek almost fell for a CC scam regarding our hotel in Jackson Hole. It's a busy time. And I made a cabachon today out of Indonesian Painted Jasper!
It's only the second cab I've ever made, and it's my first cab using the "right" method. I'm not mad at it at all. But I AM impatient, and it's costing me shine. Well. I'll get better. And I will eventually have a blog about our little basement rock workshop, but likely not until after we get back from our national parks trip.
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