Sunday July 13th

We can't believe that we left a week ago today and a week from today we will be in California. We are about half way through our journey. Today was a great day. The first day since we have been in Yellowstone that we were on our own agenda. We slept in, and we really did sleep, thanks to the long underwear Katie purchased. It was warmer last night not quite the 22 it was the night before. After sleeping in we ate a nice Trio bar breakfast we ventured into Yellowstone for our third day in a row. We headed up to the northern loop today. After yesterday we thought we had seen it all, but in fact we were in for a bigger surprise. We drove up and saw more hot springs (Mammoth springs) more waterfalls, and even more wild life. Our big plan today was to go on our hike. We had bought a brochure on the different paths and had decided on which one we would go on. So we drove the 50 miles to the Roosevelt lodge where the trail started. On the way to the trailhead we took a detour and took a side gravel road that went along the hillsides and we came upon a traffic jam. We both got out of the car and to our surprise there was a grizzly bear that everyone was photographing. SO we joined the crowds and got some good photos of the bear, at a safe distance. After hitting a few potholes and killing several butterflies on our drive down the gravel road we made it back the paved main road and headed back up to the trailhead. We packed up on backpack with our first aid kit, plenty of water, benadryl, nuts, and other essentials and we were on our way. We happen to stop a gentleman who was working at an information booth and ask him about the trail, and he told us of a different way to take to see a waterfall so we took his advice and started heading up that way, as he yells out and make sure to watch out for the bears, we have spotted several in the area today. Well about half way up the trail our common sense kicked in and we asked ourselves what would we do if we saw a bear??? Granted we had read our share of what to do in that situation. For future reference you are suppose to lay down face down with your hands behind your head and your legs spread out and stay still. Well fortunately we did not have to try this out because we realized again we don't have health insurance. So after all of our preparations, we got a few shots of the waterfall and came back down the hill and decided to hike through the gift shop instead.
After our hiking experience Lauran as tired, so Katie offered to take over driving. Once we got back on the road to head back to our campsite we noticed there were beautiful snow capped mountains in the distance that we were both in awe of. About 15 miles later we were in awe again when we were IN THE SNOW CAPPED MOUNTAINS. We were driving again.... TBD we just got KICKed out of the kitchen area.