Road Trip Day 11 (finally)

We Stayed the night in Billings MT. We packed up the car to head home to Utah and got out of the hotel by 9:00AM. We stayed at the Boothill Inn. Very Awesome. Good breakfast. I recommend it.

On our way from the hotel to the freeway I noticed we weren't going the right way and I asked Randy where we were going. He stalled and I asked him again. I finally "guessed" (about 20 questions) that he had decided to go see the temple. It ended up being a little bit further away than we thought though. It took us an extra 45 minutes. And we didn't even stop when we got there. Crazy. We kept driving though, We drove through Wyoming, into Yellowstone National park. We we took this amazing scenic drive and it was well worth it. We kept driving up and up and up the mountain until we hit about 10,000 feet. On the way up, one of our water bottles"popped" because of the altitude change and just as it did, a black bear ran into the road right in front of our car. I didn't have the camera handy at the moment so I didn't get a picture. He got scared and ran away, but not before we got a really good up close look at him. It was awesome.Jake and Ty almost at the summit.

Randy and the boys. It was so pretty up there...and cold.

Randy at the top.
When we technically got into Yellowstone park, we saw a ton of Bison. Here is one that crossed the road in front of our car.

We spotted another black bear by the side of the road.
I have been to Yellowstone a lot, but I have never seen bears there. We were driving some more and we spotted a grizzly bear! Yeah crazy! But it wasn't just a grizzly, it was a grizzly bear with two baby cubs!

you can see that the bear was pretty far away, but sure enough, she was right there. I never got a good view of the cubs though.

We tried our hardest to drive quickly through Yellowstone without making stops, but with the animals to see and stupid Junior Ranger programs to buy...yeah I said buy. It costs $5 here and it isn't worth it. They recommend you spend about 4 days in Yellowstone to complete the program, but we only had about an hour, so it was kind of hard. we had to sit through a ranger talk, do a hike and fill out five sheets of paper to get it signed off. I wish I had known what I was getting into before we did it.

We also had a traffic problem. Randy and I decided to head out of West Yellowstone so we could make it home faster, but we didn't' really plan on all the construction we would have to go through. We finally got the Ranger stuff done and was headed toward exiting the park when we came to a stop and a construction worker told us it would be about 30-45 minutes of waiting and to "please stay in your car". Great. We waited 45 minutes and then we finally got to move again. When we finally got out of the park, it was after 5:00 PM and we had to wait, yet again, for construction. This time it was only about 20 minutes of waiting, but we wanted to get home so it was that much harder. We drove and drove and drove into the night. we didn't stop unless someone had to go to the bathroom or we needed to drive through to get dinner.The kids had had it. We made it home after Midnight...and the unpacking began.