Yellowstone National Park Vacation
This was written on the way home from Yellowstone National Park vacation
So here I am. I’m currently writing this on S’s laptop, in the car, on my way back to home sweet home. If you didn’t already know, the reason for my extended absence was because I was on vacation, to Yellowstone National Park (the first national park ever, mind you). We spent a total of 3 days perusing the national park. The first 2 days of the trip were spent stopping around places and went to the Grand Teton National Park. It was fun.
We went on this big ski lift up the mountain and looked at the view. My mom’s Asian-ness was brought out. We did not want to pay 17 bucks to go on the ski lift, and we found out that if you could gather a group of 20 or more people, that you could get the tickets for 12 bucks instead of 17. Finding random people to get a group of 20 is always worth the 5 bucks you are going to save. So my mom rounded up a group of more people so we had at least 20 people. Cha-ching. So this was a good time.
Then we went to see some ice cave, which was pretty lame and basically should just not exist. The tour guide talked funny, so that was about the only thing that sustained me. Then, the next day we made the drive to our main destination: Yellowstone National Park . It was so fun, I know I’m not going to be able to remember all of the cool parts.
It was so awesome to be able to go on a vacation with my friends. We did a lot of walking, some hiking (we got lazy and turned back before even reaching our destination hah), and lots of fun sightseeing. I got really tan from all the walking we did. We looked at a lot of geysers and mud pots and other cool things, some of which smelled pretty bad (sulfur). I have lots of cool pictures that I am going to get on a CD, and I will post those up once I get them. We also saw lots of animals, and I was very excited to see so many animals. It was intense, we got pretty close up to a buffalo, and we had received a yellow slip of paper when we entered the park specifically saying how dangerous bison (buffalo) were, and to stay away from them, and here we were, standing 5 feet from one..
Unfortunately, we did not see any moose or bears. For some reason, my mom had this huge desire to see a bear. Everything she saw, she would ask, “oh is it a bear?!?” “Noo mom…its just a rock.” There are some pretty clever rocks at Yellowstone, a lot of them resemble animals.
The last day was cool because we went to Mammoth Hot Springs, and it was kind of like a little resort thing. But there was actually a private residence there, and the amazing thing was, that there were these group of bull elk that were literally eating and laying on the house's lawn. I wish I could have deer eat grass on my lawn. It was so tempting to go and pet them. Heh. We also saw some pretty (pretty stupid…er…..inside joke) scenery…including waterfalls and whatnot. We even got to see Old Faithful, twice. The first time was at night, because we thought we could squeeze it in so we didn’t have to go the next day, but we ended up seeing it again the next day anyway. It was pretty cool, I don’t know if my pictures will turn out of that tho, because I only took pictures of the one we saw at night.
We also went rowboating on Yellowstone Lake. Me and A teamed up after S got tired and we rowed for the last half. We even saw a little otter swimming. We raced at the end against the boat that J, L, and O were in, and we just BARELY lost. We should have won, but that’s okay, it was awesome.
One of the best parts of the trip was the music. Thanks to J, and his great taste in music, we were able to feel like we were on a safari in Africa. It is now one of S’s goals to go on a safari once he becomes rich. The deal was that J made me an awesome CD of all foreign music a while ago, which included some numbers from some African tribes. I have almost all the words….er…sounds…memorized now. It was awesome. We must have listened to number 9 on the track over 20 times. Yet we never got sick of it. It was awesome.
The other fun part was discovering the bass in S’s dad’s car, the Avalon. Wow, pumping up “Breathe in, Breathe out” sounds pretty sweet. The car itself was pretty cool, with a LCD display on the dashboard, that displays a whole array of information, including the outside temperature, the fuel range, how long you have traveled, the date, and your average miles per gallon. It’s a pretty awesome car. Everything is automatic. And yes, it was important and interesting enough to include in this blog.
Anyway. I had an awesome time. I didn’t even get sick of S throughout the trip, and we sure did spend a lot of time together in the car and whatnot. Well, there was a close call on the last day, but that was quickly resolved.
We also discovered that we like to argue about everything, as E has pointed out. Oh well. We made it a funny thing to do by the end of the trip. We stayed in a small town called West Yellowstone, that basically consisted of a bunch of hotels and motels and souvenir shops. They did have one Chinese restaurant, called “Chinatown,” which we decided to eat at one night, and man was it crazy. There were so many people there, all of the waiters were hustling and bustling. But the service was super quick, and the food was amazingly good, and authentic. We ate at this Italian restaurant last night, at least the “teenagers” did (Me, S, A, J, O, L, and …the exception..Jo). Although the service was not half as quick as it was in the Chinese restaurant, the food was still really good, but I did not even get to finish half of mine, but we ended up throwing it away the next day for a lack of refrigerator. So now that I have covered how good the food is, I think I am pretty much done, for now. The people were nice (its vacation, what can you say), although people get pretty anxious when they’re driving…but overall it was really awesome, and a good “bonding” experience. I have a new nickname to call S and everything. Well, I am sure I could say so much more, but I will leave it at that for now.
