Leaving Yellowstone into the Wild West

The hope this morning was to leave our cabin early to see wildlife in the Lamar Valley.  However, after a long day and late night last night, I simply didn’t want to wake everyone up early.  So we didn’t get up and get going until around 9am.

We then explored the Canyon Visitor’s Center and learned all about the volcano activity around Yellowstone. Then we spent a bit of time in the gift shop looking for just the right souvenir.  We wished we had room for this moose in the car.

Next we headed to a picnic spot where we cooked up some hot dogs on the grill.

Then on to the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone.  So beautiful!

I had hoped to take a hike along the rim, but we decided not to because of the threat of rain.  It didn’t rain on us for a while, but when it started raining, oh boy!  It rained hard for about 15 minutes. Fortunately, we were getting gas at the Eastern exit of the park, so we just hung out at the gift shop.

We didn’t really have a plan for the night since we didn’t have Internet or Cell service in Yellowstone.  So we actually had to (UGHH!) look at a paper map to get out of the park.  We made it to Cody, WY for dinner.  There we found it was Rodeo Night (in fact they have a rodeo every night in the summer).  We simply couldn’t resist.  So we ponied up for the Cody Night Rodeo.  What a kick!

We saw bareback riding, barrel riding, calf roping, and of course bull-riding.  It was a lot of fun for the whole family.  The best part, was the clown.  Despite several offensive, misogynist jokes, he put on a good show.

When it ended at 10pm, we still didn’t have any plans for lodging.  I couldn’t get AT&T service out here (apparently they don’t really do Wyoming), so we flying blind.  We pulled into a local hotel and they only had a “vacation house” left.  We took it and found it was a “double-wide” about 7 miles outside of town.  A bit scary to pull up to this strange home in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night.  But the kids liked it and it was a cozy night’s sleep. Plus, it has laundry facilities, so we got caught up on the dirty laundry.

Hopefully we’ll get AT&T reception somewhere today.  It’s been weird being completely “unplugged”.  It’s not so much the email/news that we miss.  But it’s the travel planning tools that we’ve come to rely on like Google Maps, Kayak, & Priceline.  How did they take vacations in the old days?