Day 27: Yellowstone: Follow that Hot Spot

I made reservations almost a year ago for Yellowstone.  I was worried I wasn't going to get anything.  The only campsites open had no electricity or water.  This is roughing it.  However, the camper takes the edge off of the hard camping.  We have a battery to run some lights.  Propane runs the fridge and stove.  Don't ask me how magical propane can make things hot or cold.

What is really roughing it: no cellular signal.  Yellowstone is a blackout area.  There are shaded areas marked on the map where Verizon has a couple towers, but overall prepare for cellular withdrawal.

We say bison, elk, and buffalo.  Yes, I know bison are buffalo, but we saw so many I'm listing them twice.

One plus for travelling when we are: seeing the babies.  We saw numerous baby buffalo and a baby elk,  The downside is the cold.  We woke up to seeing our breath each morning.  It take a little extra effort to crawl out the sleeping bag.

While walking around there were many buses taking tourists to all the sights.  Chinese, Indian, French (not sure if it was Canadian accent or French accent), Swedish (maybe), Japanese, Korean, German.  I hope Americans appreciate the land we have in our backyard.  We have an amazing country.

We saw Old Faithful erupt (is that the right phrase?) 3 times.  Mud pots were my favorite.  The colors around the hot springs and geysers are bacteria mats.  This is a layer of bacteria that thrives with the hot water.  We did a lot of driving between the pools.

At one point Jen had turned on a hot spot while at Old Faithful so the kids could get email, check on Robotics, etc.  We decided to do a short trail; the kids wanted to skip this one.  After we started down the trail, we looked back and had a few kids catching up to us.  They were still connected to the hot spot and were losing signal.

Buffalo don't follow any of the rules.