Yellowstone Part 2

My dad left West Valley about 3:30 or so in the morning to pick up Shane and Austin. They got to the house about 7:30 I think?? We ate omelets for breakfast and headed out for another day at Yellowstone.

Just a cute picture of Greta playing in the dirt.

Checking out some waterfalls.

This picture kills me. Austin was NOT interested in holding Lottie. And he has such an awkward hold on her and scared look in his eyes and Lottie is staring at him like what the heck is going on and it is just perfect. He didn't even drop her.

We stopped to do a little boardwalk walk that had cool hot steamy water holes, boiling mud and geysers. Apparently the geysers around there only erupt once every 5 hours. We happened to be there when they were going off. It was awesome and Harvey loved it. He was so cute about it all. So there are about 5 or 6 in this little collection. And one was going off pretty high and then it stopped and another one started shooting off for awhile and would do some really big shots and Harvey would yell, "that was hunormous!". Then another one would start going off in the distance a little and one behind us. It really was so awesome.

I know these are dumb. They were standing right by the outhouse helping me wait for my turn. But they just looked so cute and the lighting was great - I just couldn't get them to both look at the camera at the same time. Hence all 3 are here. 

Finally got this little grump to fall asleep in the car. We drove a little past Old Faithful to a picnic spot for a lunch break. She slept the whole time in the car. It was great. And this lunch experience was really probably one of my favorite moments of the whole trip. I don't know why. It was such a quiet cool little picnic spot and it just felt like a campground. So I felt like we were camping and it was just so fun to sit with everyone and enjoy a delicious meal. My kids were running around just exploring nature which I LOVE. And we just laughed and hung out. It made my heart happy!

Then on to Old Faithful. We got there about 45 minutes or so before it was supposed to erupt. We wandered around the visitors center and then family went into a short little video while I was feeding Lottie some grub. I went searching for them because the timing for eruption was variable. When they announced the movie they said they hoped it would be done by the time it went off - well, when we walked out of the movie it was already in full force going off. That was the one thing Heather had wanted Austin to experience. So we were all a little bummed and deliberated on what to do - wait for the next one or would they come back in the park, etc. etc. We ended up wandering back towards the car and got sucked into an ice cream shop. DELICIOUS. So we got ice cream and wandered back and got front row seats. Lottie decided she was bored quite a bit before it went off so we struggled a little but made it. And it was SO worth waiting for again and being right there. It was fun up front. Harvey thought it was cool. It was cool that it would almost start and you'd think maybe it was coming but then it wouldn't. And then when it did, it really did and it was cool to see it reach it's full geyser potential and watch it for awhile. I'm so glad we stayed. It worked out great. 

Going off as we walked out of the visitor center.

Waiting for round 2.

That deer he's carrying - he wanted SOO bad. He saw it before the movie and so when I started dragging him outside he wanted to go back in (another reason it was good we waited because he didn't care at all about Old Faithful, just showing me this deer). So after we watched it he wanted to "show" me...aka he wanted to buy it. I told him no a couple of times but he was so dang sad. And I'm a sucker. And Heather got us into the park free so I figured I saved that money, I would get it for him. When we were standing in line to buy it he was SOOO happy and kept saying thank you mom! and gave me the biggest hug and said he loved me so much. I'll take that for $20 I guess.

The only bad thing about staying is it kind of killed our extra time in the park. We were hoping to not get back so late for dinner and bedtime etc. But there was one more place we wanted to stop - Grand Prismatic Springs. It is a short little stroll and super cool. This was the only place we had a hard time finding a parking spot. But we were a bit annoying and drove around the parking lot a couple of times and waited for someone to pull out a very annoyingly long amount of time. Sorry. We kind of went in phases due to sleeping kids. 

Shane had dinner basically ready for us when we got back. Delicious grilled hamburgers with bacon and pastrami and a fruit salad and cut up watermelon and potato salad and chips etc. It was amazing and SOOOO nice to not have to do much when we got back. So we focused on eating and getting kids and all of us down. It was an early morning to get to the race. 

This is us waiting at the start. It was fun doing a big race again. I love all races, just the amount of people and energy and excitement. I was pretty nervous for the run. I had had a few weeks of kind of slow, heavy feeling, hard runs. I wasn't sure what was going to happen. Well. Something good happened. I don't know how or why, but it was basically my favorite race ever. We stayed under the avg (slow) pace we were hoping for of 11 minute miles. I know - it's terrible, but we trained to finish not to be fast. And elevation and trail running we just thought we'd be that slow. We averaged about a 10:38. The climb wasn't as bad as I was expecting (we walked a TINY bit at the very end of the couple miles). And it was a BEAUTIFUL course. I tried snapping a few pictures along the way. It was so fun running it with Heather (Kathryn was a bit behind us the whole way). And I felt AMAZING. The miles were dropping like flies. We got to 8 and it felt like we had only gone 3. It was the only race I've ever done where I didn't think about when the next mile was going to come. I LOVED LOVED LOVED it. Everything about it was amazing. I did start feeling tired the last couple of miles and my left hip flexor and left knee started acting up the last mile. But otherwise it was perfection. I don't ever want to run again because nothing will ever beat that experience :) 

I'm sure this is her cheering me on :)

We headed back to the house to clean up quickly. Then started driving home. We stopped in Sugar City/Rexburg to see my grandparent's grave and then had a great binging post run meal at Freddy's. 

Oh man. Just typing all this up. I can't even think of anything bad about this trip. Haha. Ok - maybe there were more kid meltdowns than I thought and less sleep and relaxation than would be ideal, and we were missing a key part of our familia, but it was a really really great time.  Great memories. And thank goodness for a million pictures, right? :)