YELLOWSTONE !!

Granpa pays the entrance fee for the Grand Teton National Park, zooms on through, shows the receipt to the Yellowstone National Park Rangers and finds the first campsite he can.  (As we are turning 62 next month, this will be the last time we have to pay a fee to get into any National Park.  Next time, we pay $10 and that gets us an American the Beautiful Lifetime pass.  That means free entrance for the whole car load and 50% discount on campsites.  Woohoo!!)

There's a picnic table to the left of center in this photo and a tent pad in the center.  What we've discovered over the years is that one can buy humongous tents, but one can rarely find a tent pad big enough to hold it.  Our tent isn't the smallest nor the largest, but it is too large for this tent pad.  However, there's a pretty flat spot just beyond that works nicely.  The path to the right of center is apparently a favorite bear trail, though we never saw a bear here.

Each morning we were up at the crack of dawn and exploring Yellowstone, the Tetons and Jackson Hole until almost dark.  It's a good thing, too, because Granpa heeded my battle cry and chose a campsite with no wind.  There were nice breezes, but no wind -- no wind to blow the swarms of mosquitoes away!  You see, this campsite was at the southern end of Lake Lewis, and, well, you know what happens when there is even the tiniest bit of water for a mosquito to breed in...  We would eat our meals at some nice, mosquito-less picnic grounds in the parks and simply go straight into our tent in the evening.  We had two comfortable chairs in there, our laptops and Granpa had his MP3 players - we even had a porta-potty thingy.  (I know, too much information Granma!  But considering the lines outside the pit toilets in the campground, we did good.)

So, anyway, we would come "home" at dusk, zip into the tent (literally) and then relish in the fact that those pesky mosquitoes were swarming our windows but not able to come in.  I confess, I even stuck my tongue out at them a time or two! 

It was wonderfully comfortable in the tent.  Granpa has a thermometer that records the maximum and minimum temperatures each day, and as our tent was secreted in the shade of those trees, the tent would get comfortably warm during the day.  Our sleeping bags would soak up the warm, and when it came time to crawl in the sheets it was GREAT!

Mornings.  Well, the mornings were downright chilly - 40-ish.  That's about my minimum (maximum?) tolerance level for cold.  We had bought a throw with a picture of a black bear on it the last time we visited Yellowstone, and I tucked that between the bed sheet and the top of the sleeping bag.  The extra cover was perfect.  I never did feel the cold until I had to dress in the mornings.  Granpa, of course, was usually sleeping on top of the covers and delightfully happy.

And so we are cozied up here in Yellowstone for the next week.  The Park recommends that you take at least a day and a half to "see" Yellowstone.  That's what we usually do.  But this time we have the luxury of taking longer.  We'll let you know how that works out...