Day 8- Yellowstone Old Faithful

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Day 8-

Today started out on the hunt of a big hot breakfast. We Echterling's can go all day on a good breakfast. We looking at the Lake Lodge which has just ended their hot breakfast and just started the Continental breakfast. Well this is not enough for us Echterling's so we headed to the Lake hotel. At last a hot breakfast and a buffet is even better. With stomachs full we went back to the Lodge to attend church. It was a very nice Mass attended by a fair number of people and presided over by a Monk. He told every one in attendance about their life at the monastery. Ben and I shared a little chuckle when he pulled out a spring water bottle to add the Holy Water to the wine. I guess with four masses spread out over 200 miles in about 18 hours you use things that travel well.

After Mass we were heading to West Thumb when cell phone service was restored to our phones. We pulled off to listen to our messages and called home to see how Ginger was. We were informed that she was sleeping on the bed exhausted after having spent 2 hours on the boat fishing with Grandma and Grandpa Echterling.

West Thumb is a place of Geysers along the lake and also some hot springs. Some of these hot springs again had an odor of rotten eggs which thrilled the kids to no end. After you got past those few with odor the beautiful colors of the remaining ones were more to the kids liking. The geysers of this area have not erupted since an earthquake in the not so distant past.

Onward to Old Faithful. As we were approaching the area I could see a huge plume of water over the trees. I thought it was old Faithful, but when we arrived at the visitor's center I learned that if must have been The Grand. The largest predictable geyser in the world. We then had a family "discussion" of were to stand to best see Old Faithful erupt. We ended up in 3 different positions along the back boardwalk. This did wonders to ease some tensions of being in a small space together for a longer period of time then we are used too. We watched Old Faithful with much "Ahh" and respect. We then walked around the other upper Geyser Field and saw some other smaller geysers erupt. After hearing the opinions of the 2 younger Echterling's we then stopped for some cold ice cream because it was the hottest part of the day and we had forced a walk upon them.

We then headed back towards West Thumb to the Grant Village. At this Visitors Center was an evening Ranger program so that Alea could complete her Junior Ranger program requirement for her patch. We saw a program about the night animals at Yellowstone. Most of the discussion was about the owl, bats, and the coyote.

After the program we needed to find a little something to eat. Like I said Breakfast can last almost all day. We headed back to camp but after about 15 minutes realized we were heading the wrong way. So yet again returned to camp after 10pm. On our trip around the camp to our site, Chris saw a coyote walking in to the woods.

The end of day 8.



Lisa

Fun Fact on the Day- Did you know that if you drove on all of Yellowstone's over 200 miles of road you would only SEE 2 percent of Yellowstone's more than 2 million acres.

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