Day 25: Thursday, April 30, 2015 - Yellowstone National Park/Gardiner,MT

We woke up to steady rain this morning, so we took our time and had a nice breakfast (eggs scrambled with peppers and sausage), hung out and played with Lucas at the kitchen table for a while 

and then we all had a nap before heading out for the day. 

Lucas was a challenge at nap time today though. He's gotten a little too used to napping in his car seat and not in his bunk in the trailer. It took us both a combined effort of over 20 minutes to get him to sleep (& stop him from trying to crawl or stand up in his bunk)! But he sure looked peaceful once he was finally out.

Lucas and his daddy both woke up happy from their naps!

And here they are again, ready to go take on an afternoon in Yellowstone National Park.

Our first stop was at the visitor centre at Mammoth Hot Springs. They had an amazing taxidermy display of all the wild animals commonly found in the park.

There was still snow visible at some of the higher elevations in the park. Temperatures ranged from 14-20 degrees Celsius for us today, depending on where we were.

We still got delayed by road construction, but we had already eaten lunch, so it wasn't so bad.

We drove for about an hour including road construction to go see Old Faithful.

Luckily when we arrived, we only had to wait about half an hour to see it erupt. (It erupts roughly every 90 minutes.) We got in a family selfie while waiting, of course!

And here's the erupting geyser! It lasted for about three minutes actually, and was definitely a crowd pleaser. These three photos are before...

During...

And as it's finishing up...

We took a short boardwalk tour of several other nearby geysers,

all in different shapes and sizes, and with different, fun names. This is Lucas with the "Infant Geyser."

There was an amazing array of colours and shapes around each geyser or hot pool. This is one half of the "Doublet Pool."

We saw lots of bison again today. This herd was right next to the highway. You can see the shadow of our Jeep in the picture actually!

Back at the campsite for dinner (BBQ burgers & salad), and Lucas is eager to look into my iPhone as usual, lol!

He is such a ham for the camera!

Day 24: Wednesday, April 29, 2015 - Pocatello, ID to Gardiner, MT

Travel day again today.  We left Pocatello, Idaho nice and early, at 8:45 a.m., shortly after Lucas had a final visit with the picnic table. 

Today's destination is Yellowstone National Park. We pass through Montana on the way there.

Rob was quite thrilled that Lucas slept for 2.5 hours and we made it from Pocatello all the way to West Yellowstone in that same time.

While the day started off great, there was road construction in Yellowstone that really delayed us, and really delayed lunch, leaving all three of us hungry and less than happy, aka hangry. Sorry for the bad photo, I was in the back seat with Lucas trying to keep him happy by slowly feeding him Gerber puffs stars.

When we got to Mammoth Hot Springs, we found out that the first-come-first-served campground was already full. It filled up while we were slowly driving through construction. They only had half the sites open anyway, since it's April. Also, this campground is sandwiched between the road into and out of Yellowstone.  It's definitely not the nicest park campground I've seen.

So we stopped for lunch, finally. No outdoor picnic today, as there was a buffalo by the picnic area. We witnessed a really stupid couple who went to close to this buffalo, with the man even making grunting noises, and of course the buffalo charged at them. Lucky for them it only gave a half attempt and they ran away in time. The buffalo went back to eating grass right away. It's amazing how stupid some people are!

Since the only open campground in Yellowstone was full, we drove out the north gate into the town of Gardiner to look for camping. The roads all through this town are currently under construction. 

We got the last campsite at the only open campground in town. Phew! 

It's a pretty nice one too, right on the Yellowstone River. Really, it's a much nicer campsite than the ones at Mammoth in the park, so we really lucked out.  Again, Lucas enjoyed time under our tree, in his exersaucer.

We did have to be careful with our feet though, due to an excessive amount of deer poop!

The rest of our day was pretty mellow, as my stomach was feeling off. We just hopped in the Jeep around the time of Lucas' usual afternoon nap and did a bit of driving in the park.

We saw the hot spring terraces, created by the hot water coming out of the earth's surface around here. 

And if you look carefully at this photo, you will see a large herd of Buffalo on this plain. We were wondering if any of these buffalo are some of the ones they moved down here from Elk Island Park in Alberta?

Day 23: Tuesday, April 28, 2015 - Moab, UT to Pocatello, Idaho

It's time to leave Moab and head north towards home! Here's one last shot of the Jeep in our campground, with all its lovely red mud!

The highway heading north out of Moab is so scenic.

Highway 6/191 between Price and Helper, Utah, heading north.  The scenery is less red now.

Imposing rocks just north of the town of Helper, on our way towards Provo, Utah.

Lucas is often our content and sleepy passenger. We've learned that if we all get up at 6:00 a.m., he will very likely have an extended morning nap two or so hours later, during off-road or highway driving!

We saw wind mills near the town of Spanish Fork just SE of Provo, Utah.

Here is our happy Lucas in his car seat! He was remarkably content today, even though we drove for close to 650 kms! We did take turns siting in the back seat when he was awake to keep him entertained though.

Really, he was pretty easy to travel with today in part due to him taking a couple of nice naps as well. Notice Sophie the giraffe peeking out from under his arm here!

When we arrived in Pocatello, Idaho, our stop for the night, we made a necessary stop at Walmart for some groceries. This is Rob trying to select just the right case of beer in the beer aisle. There were so many delicious choices, and many of them the craft beers we like to sample too. We ended up choosing a Blue Moon taster pack, with four different kinds of beers!

How do you make an almost 10 month old's day? Give him a ride in a grocery cart and let him play with a package of paper towel!

We had dinner at Arby's, and Lucas really enjoyed sitting next to his daddy. He was also a big fan of the roast beef.

Tonight's campground is called Cowboy RV Park, a Good Sam Park in Pocatello. It's really nice and has great facilities, but thank goodness we found some friendly neighbors to get the wifi and bathroom codes though, as the office closed early at 6:00 p.m.

Lucas enjoyed stretching his legs in his poop chair, I mean exersaucer again this evening too. He's only 9.75 months old, but he's looking more and more like a toddler every day...that's our big 31" tall baby boy.

Day 22: Monday, April 27, 2015 - last day in Moab, UT

It was a glorious blue sky, sunny morning. We got up and out fairly early, and headed back to the Sand Flats Recreation Area. Here are some Jeeps starting out on a very extreme trail called "Hell's Revenge." We would need to modify our Jeep in order to do that trail!

Instead, we went back and did the rest of the "Fins and Things" trail that we did a small section of a few days ago.

The trail is marked with white arrows, grey tire tracks, and these fun painted on white dinosaurs, because the stegosaurus has fins on his curved back, and the high spine of a curved hill is called a "fin."

Sun, slickrock and sand...what a fun morning!

Me having fun on a sandy bit of the trail.

Today's family selfie at a viewpoint/bottle feed/diaper change stop.

Rob and Lucas at the same viewpoint.

Lucas considering a career in rock climbing.

Our Jeep tracks in the moist sand...with slickrock scenery in the background.

Look! A dinosaur shaped rock along the trail!

This is what makes this trail fun and exciting...just look where we were going! Those grey lines are where the trail goes across the slickrock.

A happy man and his Jeep...and beautiful scenery too!

A fun photo of the Jeep and the clouds.

And one more artsy photo of some flowers along the trail.

Just to show that we still have a typical baby boy, here's Lucas after a midday shower, after he had a nasty "poo-splosion" when we were back at the trailer for lunch time.

In the afternoon we headed just north of Moab to drive the Gemini Bridges trail. It was rated easy in our guide book, but it was actually quite rocky coming in from the east side. (The west side of the trail was nice and sandy!) It's also one of the busiest roads we've been on, as it's a connector to several other popular off-road trails in the area.

Can you spot Rob and Lucas on top of one of the bridges?

Heres another view of one of the Gemini Bridges.

Check out the lovely red mud on the Jeep tires!

We had another dinner outside on our last night in Moab. Lucas is excitedly looking up at the tree in our campsite. 

We had fun with a pre-bedtime visit to the playground at our campground too. What a cool airplane! 

Lucas and Rob had fun on the swings too.