Yellowstone!

Our honey-loving sister also told us about a road "we just have to drive on!".  That road is the Bear Tooth Highway, which enters the park from the extreme northeast.  So, leaving from Helena, we drove east on I-90 (yuk...driving east) all the way to the other side of the park (many hours, let me tell you), and then cut back toward the west to enter via the Bear Tooth Highway.  This highway was magnificent, and Lysa was right again!  It travels through an area of high alpine, at over 10,000 feet elevation.  It is so very cool!

Then we drove to the entrance station and found out that all the campgrounds in the park were either closed or full.  Bummer, but not!  We called our brother Paul and asked if we could stay in his wife Irene's family cabin on Hebgen lake,  just on the other side of the park.  This is the cabin that Paul and I worked on the first summer that Sue and I were married!  He said "sure!", so we had another warm and welcoming place to stay.  Good thing too, because that night it stormed like crazy and we were glad to not be in a tent.  We met this guy along the road, as we had gotten out of the car to look at a roadside information booth.  Sue looked up as we were walking along and said, "wow, that guy sure is wearing a big coat!"  (she thought it was a person...maybe she's due an eye exam??)

The next day was cool and rainy, a perfect day to explore the hot pots and geysers of Yellowstone, because steam was coming out of everywhere.

Sue got some great pictures of the mud pots...it seems that they shatter when they pop!  I got this great picture of Sue...isn't she beautiful?

Paul and Irene came up the next day and we spent Saturday laying tile in their new cabin.  I then decided to spend the next week with Paul tiling the whole thing!  We had a great time working and reminiscing, and we're pretty good tilers to boot!

That last picture deserves some explanation.  30 years ago when Paul and I were finishing this cabin, the log you see me pointing at was used to support the stairs on the other side of this bathroom wall.  Paul was about to cut off this end sticking out into the bathroom, but I asked him not to.  I saw that it was in the perfect spot for a very unique toilet roll holder!  So, I carved and chiseled out the inside of the log and the Richard's family has used it as a toilet roll holder ever since.  That crack in the bottom that lets the TP come out was a natural feature of the log that I put to good use.  (also, if any of you have ever heard of my run-in with a chain saw, this was the bathroom where that happened...in no way connected to the toilet roll holder!)

After such a great week I had to bolt back to Colorado Springs for a job interview at the Air Force Academy, which went pretty well!