McBerkoBlog

Hotel weight room for me, breakfast and showers for everyone, and grocery restocking at Walmart before we hit the road once again. We had a 3.5-4 hour drive from Helena to Glacier, which was really flat until we got close to the park. We stopped in a small town in Montana to eat a picnic lunch at a city park near a rodeo. A cute little fawn and her mom entertained us. The park had the fanciest outhouse we'd seen - nice and bright, clean, multi-stall - though Bill's side wasn't quite as fancy, with its "pee gutter" urinal. Ew. We entered at St. Mary's Visitor Center to stop and look around, then backtracked the few miles outside the park to our nearby KOA. This was the one place where our luck ran out with reservations, the park campgrounds booking up immediately after being released. Being a KOA, sites were packed together like sardines, but at least each site had tons of plants so felt reasonably private. We set camp, made some pasta for dinner, then visited ...

Time to pack up yet again. Northwest quadrant of the park today then heading north toward Glacier. We stopped at Roaring Mountain and the Obsidian Cliff (Ruth: "1 star, underwhelming"; I agree) on the way to our big site for the day - Mammoth Hot Springs. I was excited to see this area since all the pictures I'd seen when researching looked otherworldly.  Zadie: Meh Zadie was Yellowstoned out by this point, over it, and not interested in walking around this area in the heat. Here's her take, written as we drove away: Mammoth Spring was horrible, hot, and long. I was very upset and it sucked. 1 star, 0 if possible. Sincerely, Zadie The rest of us enjoyed it! How could you not? Ruth said it looked like the moon. We had several hours to drive after leaving here, but made several stops along the way. First, we got some Thai food in a small town where we split two yummy meals and still had a ton of leftovers. Next, we drove through downtown Bozeman (cute!) where we popped ...

Seemed like time flew by when we were actually in Yellowstone, and that it's taking longer to document than it took to see it! Nevertheless, we persist... Today was northeast quadrant day. Another slowish start to nice weather (high 82 today, little sprinkles but no major rain), then we headed back up past Grandma Nancy Mountain, aka Mt. Washington, to see Tower Falls and the Calcite Springs.  We went west to the top center of the park - pretty views but no animals - stopping at the Petrified Tree (meh), then stopped for a picnic lunch in a construction zone. With no active construction around us and no other options nearby, we decided it was safe enough.  Sign: “Temporary construction area. Keep out.” Ope! To this point, we'd seen very few animals today. Zadie had even started a car "game show" called "Rock or Bison?" where the answer was always rock. Heading into the Lamar Valley, there was a sign to watch out for bison, and I laughed and joked about how w...

Back through the southeast quadrant of the park today, since we'd made minimal stops on that same route in from Grand Teton. We started slowly to let the girls catch up on sleep after their thunderstorm car sleeping night, and they needed showers too. Plenty of days in the park meant we didn't have to rush, for which everyone was much happier. We also realized at breakfast that between our coffee, chai, and oatmilk, we could make a pretty decent dirty chai latte for Ruth. Not too shabby for a campground! In our trip bible page for today, we noted this was a big bison day - "bison, bison everywhere!" We hit our first bison traffic jam today. We were amazed every time we got to see the bison close up, and were surprised at the super mad and honking guy - guess he was over it. We never bored of bison. We saw herds of bison for the first time in Yellowstone today (having seen only the one herd previously in Teton), and especially loved seeing all the baby bison including ...

Let's take a break from recapping the day to day of our travel to look at the logistics of this trip, which was quite the challenge to plan. Figuring out what to bring and where to put it was as difficult as figuring out where to go and what to do.  Planning We started planning last November, focusing first on which cities and parks we'd visit. We had a family discussion about where everyone hoped to go, what types of things we wanted to do, and how long we were open to driving each day. I took that info and started mapping out some options, then we met again to discuss the options and adjust the plan. Among other changes, we chopped off an entire final leg during this review once we realized that our trip would be ~7 weeks long! That left us with a plan for what city or park we'd be in each night of the trip, which was key to be able to book campsites when reservations open 6 months ahead. I had notifications on my phone to remind me each day reservations opened so I could...

First full day in Yellowstone! After the rainstorm the night before, we were happy to wake up to sunny skies. We quickly set up the girls' tent while it was dry, then bought coffee so we could get on the road early. Yellowstone is huge, and our plan for the day was to explore the southwest section of the park starting with Old Faithful. It got hot early (low-mid 80s), and we aborted our hike time around Old Faithful due to Zadie's complaints. (Bad sleep night for her did not help the situation.) We grabbed a spot on the ground and watched Old Faithful, which Zadie declared unimpressive. She said we oversold it and it didn't live up to our hype. :) Lesson learned! She was excited, however, to explore every one of the zillion gift shops in the area. We visited too many, got a few gifts and souvenirs, then found a picnic table for lunch. When we stopped in the Old Faithful Lodge for a bathroom break before leaving, we got to see a second eruption. On the route back, we stopped...

Slowly but surely catching up with documenting this trip on the blog, folks, stick with me! We're about halfway through. Thank goodness for our daily written notes for reference. Anyway, on to day 16 - from Teton to Yellowstone today! Big day. Followed a short path from our campground over to the river to check out the view and look for animals (no luck), then packed up camp. We drove  south to Jackson first to stock up on groceries and call my dad. Bummed that we didn’t have time to walk around Jackson – cute town! We looped back the way we came, and after a long delay due to a car accident on the two-lane road, saw our final views of the Tetons as we drove north to Yellowstone. Quick stop at Colter Bay for a picnic lunch, then on to Yellowstone. I was excited for everyone to see Yellowstone. All through the trip, we had been amazed at how different each area was from the last, but with all the geothermal activity, Yellowstone was quite the outlier. We purposely hadn't watched...

Day 2 with the Tetons! We spent this one full day in the park, and made the most of it. After seeing so many close-up deer in Rocky Mountain and then the bison herd when we arrived in Grand Teton, we were excited to spot more animals and left early to start searching. Big fail. Antelope Flats? No antelope. Was that brown thing across a field an elk? Even with our binoculars, we couldn't tell. Distant bison. In one win, eagle-eyed Ruth spotted a huge bird flying with  a snake in its beak. We were glad we saw the bison close-up yesterday or would’ve been really bummed with the lack of animals today! We looped up to Colter Bay at the north side of the park for the Visitor Center, gift shop, and lunch at a restaurant where we had our first huckleberry ice cream of the trip. Thumbs up all around on the huckleberry, which Zadie put into her “top 4 flavors” and likened to the classic  Michigan flavor Blue Moon. After lunch, we made our way to crowded  Jenny Lake and lucked out ...

On to Grand Teton National Park! Big excitement late in the day once we arrived at the park, but we started with a hotel breakfast, restocking groceries at Walmart, and 5+ hours of driving through Wyoming. We stopped for a picnic lunch in a small town park. Continuing our drive, we spotted many pronghorns along the way and not much else.  Immediately after entering the park’s east Moran entrance in the late afternoon, we saw a huge herd of bison, including a huge one right next to the road. This was really exciting for everyone – our first bison of the trip! We realized later how lucky we were to see this, after our other attempts to see animals in Teton came up short.  After stopping for some pictures in front of the beautiful Teton range, we stopped at the C. Thomas Visitor Center and watched a movie about the park, then headed to the Gros Ventre campground since it was getting late. There were bear warnings everywhere, so we spent some time here reviewing all the bear tips ...