Day 4

Monday, June 11, 2007

Hello friends tonight I write to you from Yellowstone the land of the bears, lakes, and geysers we arrived at Yellowstone tonight at about 10 PM, after a day of very tiring driving. Since we had arrived at Mount Rushmore after the time for sleep had passed we decided to simply get some breakfast and be on our way to Yellowstone while stopping at Devils Tower along the way, and power nap along the way. We stopped at a shopping center about halfway down the Mountain for dinner/breakfast/lunch and got some subway subs that didn’t taste quite that good and drank a lot of coffee. After our snack we were on our way ready to complete another 13 hour drive through a few states quite a feat anyway, but without a full nights sleep to go on, real accomplishment. Again as we left we passed very few medium sized population centers on our way to the highway, and once we got on the highway it was nice clear straight roads for a while, or so I remember however I did fall asleep almost immediately after we got on the highway so I cant tell too much about the drive although I can attest to the fact that, today when Kybo and I drove we had each only had 2 hours of sleep to work on which was a very interesting experience, luckily the highway mentioned above was just straight totally undeveloped area rural highway so the driving was not too difficult in terms of skill, it was only strenuous in terms of sleep.
Kybo woke me up about a quarter of the way to Yellowstone when we arrived at a pre-planned stop along the way, Devils Tower probably one of the coolest natural phenomenon that I have seen it was a natural chimney of rock jutting out in the middle of miles and miles of flatland, a moving experience. After a delayed stop in the gift shop where I took a picture of a sign that said, “Hippies use side door” and thought it was hilarious. We delayed for as long as we could in the gift shop next to devils tower and procrastinated some more after that but in the end we realized that it was time for us to go and nothing could be done about it.
After more really enjoyable driving shifts on virtually no sleep we made it to Yellowstone fairly uneventfully, the only real excitement of the drive that I remember is passing a town with a population of 10. Once we were almost at Yellowstone however I pulled over the car into a gas station and we began to clean it because I had been told that bears would break into cars with food regardless of locks and windows. After the car was nice and clean we were hungry so we stopped at a supermarket (we could not find any fast food at all) and made sandwiches with cheese and tuna. We then entered Yellowstone national park where we met some fellow road trip Marylanders who were following virtually the same route as us. On one of the trips back to our car to get some food I managed to twist my ankle right after stepping over a log which is so much fun to do in Yellowstone at night after a few minutes however the pain abated and I returned to the Marylanders. Once we had all settled down we went to our new friends spot and after much firewood scavenging got a scraggly fire going that grew enormously once we found a dead tree, a little later we found out from someone else that the rangers collect all of the firewood and then sell it so they make sure it is difficult to find firewood in the campsite, however that time we triumphed.
Once we got back from our adventure with our counterparts it became apparent that the tent that I brought along was not going to work and that we would need something else to sleep in. After about 15 seconds on thinking we both came to the only logical conclusion, sleep in the car, and so we did. In the process of sleeping in the car we discovered that one convenient thing about sleeping in the car is that you can turn up the climate control to precisely the correct temperature an advantage we had over all those tents, truly however the sleep wasn’t that bad because I was so exhausted that any sleep at all was incredible regardless of location. Luckily no bears came to visit us through the night and we got to sleep until 10 AM, which did wonders for our poor depleted bodies.