The whole family needed to be up early today since it’s get away day. We have a time scheduled to pickup our next vehicle at 3 pm and we need to drive all the way down Montana and down into Wyoming. Google maps has been giving me ranges of 7.5 – 9 hours for the trip. I guess Google’s AI has figured out our habits and isn’t sure if we’re going to take a 1.5 hour shopping break in some Montana Lululemon along the way. I was up at 4:30 and we were packed and out the door at 5:45, just before breakfast serving time.
We were running a little low on gas, so I made a quick stop at a gas station and picked up some fresh starburst and sweet tarts – my long drive required candy. The girls, including Noelle – the passenger princesses – were passed out for several hours at the start of the ride. They missed some good views: my friends the Rockies on the left and lakes on the right that I watched transition into dawn to day time. I even passed a bald eagle just hanging out on a wooden post by the road. It gave a look that was saying , “I hope you’re enjoying your drive through America – please hit an animal for me”. No free meals today Mr. eagle.
The princesses eventually woke up and discovered they were hungry as I was passing through a town with a McDonald’s. We did the drive thru race where they all jump out to use the restroom, I go through the drive thru, and they jump back in on the other side. I usually win the race. We left with some sausage biscuits and hash browns for the road. Noelle told me to get ketchup, but I did not get the ketchup.
Our path south took us into a new state for everyone – Idaho. Noelle wants us to visit every state, but you can’t just drive through for it to count – we have to stop for some kind of substantial event to check a state off the list. We’re up to like 15-20 states so far, depending on how substantial you consider the stops we made.
The section of Idaho that we saw was mostly hilly farm country with the occasional small resort town next to a lake. I’m not sure what everyone was growing, but I’ll assume potatoes. We did pass one more majestic bald eagle chowing down on a deer carcass road side with a couple raven friends. God Bless America.
Several more hours into Idaho and we started getting hungry for lunch. We struggled for awhile to find anything above 3 stars in Google maps for lunch, then Noelle found a place called Frostop that looked like a 1950’s diner and had a drive-in. We were a little ahead of schedule, so we went inside to eat. Food was very good for diner food. Lots of good fried food. I got a burger, Noelle got a BLT, and the girls got their usual chicken tenders. I also finally got what I’ve been dreaming of for days – a huckleberry milkshake. It was fantastic!
Once we were far enough south, we started cutting back east and ran into a new state – Wyoming. Wyoming was wide open plains with and more arid looking grasslands with cattle grazing that felt like they should be filming wild west movies close by. We starting running into the snow covered rocky mountains and knew we were getting close to our next destination.
We left the country and started to hit small towns that looked like they were more geared towards tourists and saw the signs for Jackson Wyoming. We had to do one very steep traverse over a mountain pass then went down and we were in Jackson city. Jackson the town was not what I imagined it to be. It felt like a cross between a western saloon town and a high end colorado ski resort town. Jackson Hole is definitely on the list for to do some snow skiing, so this gives us a chance to scout things out.
One of things we’ve all been very excited about is the next transition to our next vehicle – a camper van. Months ago we reserved a camper van from a company called Moterra that has several locations, including Jackson. They have a few models, but the one we had was built from a Mercedes sprinter van chassis and had a pop top. The pop top gave room for a bed above the sofa seat that also converted into a bed for adults. It comes fully stocked with all the camping supplies you could need. It has a fridge, furnace, AC, kitchen with fresh water supply and a water pump, pots, pans a propane grill, solar power. The electrics were charged from the solar and the diesel. It was a great machine ideal for camping. We loved it immediately.
The guy there helped walk us through all of the features of the van one a time. I probably should have videoed that, but there was a set of instructions included as well. I’m sure I’ll figure it out. These things cost like $150k new so I made sure to get the insurance in case I back into a bear.
So now that we have a camper van to get around, we no longer need the Jeep Grand Cherokee anymore and we left for the airport to go return it. I was thrown straight into the frying pan driving the van around fairly busy downtown Jackson traffic (including someone driving a horse-drawn stage coach) and Noelle followed in the jeep. The van sat much higher than I’m used to driving, but I adjusted fairly easily and didn’t harm any horses. After a quick gas fill up, we found the road that lead out of the city. The Jackson airport was right outside of town on the way to Grand Teton about 5-10 minutes outside of town. It was a very very small airport. I was stressed thinking about how I was going to pickup Noelle with the camper van while she was dropping off the rental at Avis, but the whole airport, including rental returns, all operated out of one fairly small parking lot. There wasn’t even anyone outside working the car rental return to make sure you weren’t returning it smashed.
I parked in one spot, walked over to Noelle who just parked it in the line marked Avis returns, and we walked inside a little confused. There wasn’t a single person waiting in line in the ticketing area. I walked over to the rental return place that was right there which also had noone in it and told them I was there to return the rental. His one question was “Did you fill it up with gas?”. I said “yes”, and he said “ok, you’re good to go” and took the keys. No inspection or anything – what a different world.
From there, we had two different complications that occurred at the same time:
- We didn’t have any groceries yet and it didn’t look like there were any along the way since you were driving into the national parks next. and…
- Noelle started to have some fairly bad pain and kept feeling like she needed to visit the restroom every 5 minutes.
Both of these pointed to us needing to go back to the city to get things handled. We turned the van back around and drove into town. Noelle found an urgent care that we could visit to get looked at. The plan was to drop her off and me and the girls go grocery shopping. We actually pulled into the wrong place first that was named the same, but not the urgent care and I had to go back and pick her up again.
The actual urgent care was perfect considering the circumstances – it was in the same shopping center as a Smith’s grocery store. I parked and she went to urgent care and I went to urgently get groceries. We hadn’t finalized our camping groceries meal list so I went in winging it and grabbed a bunch of things that sounded good to me. Noelle was seen very quickly and they were even able to call in her prescription to the Smith’s we were already shopping in. She walked from the urgent care to the Smith’s and helped correct any mistakes I made in grocery shopping, we grabbed the prescription and we were out the door with diagnosis, medicine, and groceries in maybe an hour and a half from when we arrived. That’s about as fortunate as you can get in that situation on a national park tour.
We left the town again and were back on the open road, and what a road it was. The kids loved sitting back on the couch playing Uno together and we had a fairly close view of the Tetons to our left and an elk sanctuary on the right in a huge fenced in field. We saw one elk in there with all the room in the world, but i’m sure the rest are around here somewhere.
After a short drove north, we entered into Grand Teton national park. We are on the way to Yellowstone, but the two parks are connected by a road and that was the quickest way to get there. The drive had plenty of mountain views and road barriers on the side that keep you from barreling off the edge into the mountains. We’ll be back a this park to visit for longer in 4 days.
We came around one hairpin turn and there were 10 cars pulled off to the side of the road with people in the road desperately trying to take pictures of something on the right. IT’S A BEAR! It looks to be a grizzly bear right there on the side of the road maybe 15 yards from all of the people. He was just minding his business eating some grass and flowers over there. We took a couple pictures and videos from the car and carefully weaved through the road photographers before they got mauled.
After another hour or so of driving through Teton, we arrived at the entrance to Yellowstone park. The sun was starting to go down and our current ETA put us getting to the campsite at 9pm, so we didn’t have time to site-see, but we did jump out to grab a quick picture of the entrance sign.
Yellowstone is known for all of the wildlife that is allowed to roam free in the park. We immediately came upon buffalo grazing on the side of the road, walking around landscape that was dumping steam from anywhere from the volcanic / geyser activity that Yellowstone is also famous for. We ran into another group of photographers that were taking photos of a distant black bear. I think the bear count is currently at 4. We hit the gas and continued up to north yellowstone.
At dusk, we found our campground for the next 4 days – Madison campground. They require you to check-in before entering your spot. I wasn’t expecting anyone to still be working the registration desk at this point, but there were a couple nice rangers that gave me my site and other helpful information about the services there. This is more of a primitive campsite. No water/power hookups, just a bathroom to use (but no showers). We’ll see how long my pampered princeses turn into stinking ghouls without showers. Someone flashed our lights at us as we were driving in to warn us about a huge buffalo just laying there next to the road into the campsite. This is going to be a very exciting camping experience if we’re competing with space with the buffalo! We found our spot and it was a very nice one. We had tons of space and woods behind us. It came with a fire ring, picnic table, and a bear box that all of the signs say you should use for your trash, food, or anything else you don’t want bears to dig into. I backed us in and raised up the pop top.
It was fairly late at this point, but we were all still starving. Noelle had bought a chicken alfredo frozen meal in a bag, so I pulled out the propane grill and cooked that thing up about 10 minutes. For a frozen meal, it was pretty good – definitely enough to fill empty stomachs. Around us, all the campers had their campfires going and you could hear the sounds of nature all around. We were all tired from the very long day of travel today, especially me who was awake for all of it, so we figured out how to setup the camper for sleeping – girls on top with sleeping bags, us on the bottom with sofa converted to a bed and sheets and a nice comforter for warmth. We tried to figure out the heater and set it to heat for 45 minutes. It was comfortable in the camper at that point, but it is supposed to get cold tonight. Hopefully we don’t freeze to death tonight – I want to see everything yellowstone has to offer tomorrow!