Yellowstone Road Trip – Day 5
Breakfast was freeze-dried eggs with sausage, onions and peppers. I was expecting powdered eggs and not real eggs. Mountain House Breakfast Skillet was really good…not just ok, but “can I have more, please?” good! The package said one serving, but there was more than enough for the two of us.
This morning we entered Yellowstone….finally made it! As we drove to Grant Village, we stopped at anything that didn’t require a lot of walking (the altitude was causing my chronic inflammation to flare up, plus I found it difficult to breathe and was light-headed). I didn’t expect the geothermal stuff to excite me, but I found it to be the best part about Yellowstone. The contrast of colors between the thermal pools and bacteria mats was so striking. We also saw a small herd of bison…one male, four females and four calves. We even made it a few minutes before Old Faithful erupted and actually found seats with a good view! After that show, we stopped in the Old Faithful General Store for lunch.
Pressing on to Grant Village, we saw elk twice. The second time was right after turning onto the road to Grant Village and this group had two fawns with them.
After setting up our tent, we were beat and decided to take a short nap before venturing out again. After we woke up, we got in the car and I started backing out of the site. It was an incline and I failed to see the decorative, short log stumps until I backed over one. Pulling forward, Ryan hollered that he though we were dragging something. Good lord…now what? I got out and was horrified to see my rear bumper ripped off and hanging by a thread! I was able to push it back into place, but something else was rubbing against the right rear tire, so I didn’t think I could drive it to a garage. So, I called AAA, only to learn that they couldn’t come into the Park and that the Park had it’s own service. They connected me and I was told that the Grant Village garage would be at my location within 15 minutes. When the guy got to me, he told me that I had also bent my exhaust and kicked it so it wouldn’t rub as much. I told him I didn’t care about cosmetics, so if he had duct tape to hold the bumper in place, I was ok with that. He did…and used some, but asked me to follow him to the garage that was only about a mile away. As I drove there, I could still hear something rubbing. One hour and $101 later, my car was driveable and not much worse for wear. The exhaust is bent, but still works fine and I have to be careful about driving over anything really bumpy so the bumper doesn’t vibrate back off (all the holes that held the screws holding it in place were ripped through).
After all of this, I was too peeved with myself to cook, even if it only meant boiling water and adding it to a pouch (the thought of pulling things out of the trunk, eating, cleaning up, and re-packing everything was too much for me right then). So, we had dinner at the Grant Village Lake House Restaurant. Ryan had a cheese burger and I had trout with tomatoes and artichoke. They won’t win anything prizes, but the food was tasty and filled us up.
We were in bed and asleep by 9:30pm. It got very cold…down in the low 40s…and even though I had on sweats and inside a thick sleeping bag, I was chilled enough to wake three times to go pee. Crawling out of a tent in the dark, with bad knees is bad enough, but when faced with the real possibility of running into a bear, I really didn’t relish getting up so often.
