Lincoln Highway
Day 23
We were ready to leave Butte, MT at 7am this morning. Steve always checks over the car before we leave for any maintenance issues and when he checked the tires he realized the back tire on his side had a crooked stem instead of it being straight. He knew something was wrong and sure enough he had another leak in an inner tube. By the time he changed the tire and patched the hole we were on the road an hour later than planned.
We drove on another nice 2 lane highway going towards Yellowstone National Park. The last time we were at Yellowstone was in 1980. The kids were 3 and 4 ½ years old and we had our dog along. We drove a pickup with a topper pulling a camper. The kids were on a mattress in the back of the pickup just hanging out! We’d talk to then through the window of the truck. Boy, have times changed!
Today we passed through the town of Ennis. It was a cute town with a lot of shops I’d liked to have stopped, but Steve was on a mission to get to Yellowstone. The Madison River appeared soon after Ennis and we began to see a lot of people fishing on the shore and in boats. That explained why we also saw so many fishing shops along the way.
In 1959 a 7.5 earthquake hit a popular camping area just 6 miles from West Yellowstone. This quake split a mountain in two and created a landslide that blocked the flow of the Madison River and formed Earthquake Lake. Twenty- eight campers were killed in the quake.
We stopped at the Earthquake Lake Visitor center. It’s a beautiful building with so much information on the earthquake. You can see where the mountain slid and the lake that was formed from the windows of the building and it’s observation deck. It really is mind-boggling what nature can do and the lives it affected.
While we were there I wanted a picture taken by the entrance of the Visitor Center and a man offered to take our picture. He was and his wife were biking from Washington D.C. to Astoria, OR. He told us it was his 50thbirthday today. We congratulated him and I asked him when they started their journey. He replied May 12th, in which I informed him that was our 50th anniversary! A little later he saw us in our car and was excited to hear about our trip and the car. As we talked he wrote down our names, where we were from and all about the car. I think he’s probably writing a journal about his bike trip and the people he meets. Others also came around and asked us questions. It was fun having our 15 minutes of fame.
For most of this trip not that many people have said much about our car, but today it seemed everyone was interested. When we got to the gate entrance of Yellowstone, the gate attendant quizzed us about the car and how cool she thought it was. Once inside we had the same experience from many others. Truth be known, I suppose we are an oddity.
I wanted to stop at the first place we saw to walk around the geysers, but it was so packed we couldn’t find a parking spot so we moved on. Luckily, the geysers are everywhere and the next place we were able to get out and see them up close.
Finally, we made it to the center of Yellowstone where there’s the lodge, gift shops and Old Faithful! We rushed from our car to see the famous geyser just to find out we missed it blow by minutes and we would now have to wait an hour for it to blow again.
I went to the gift shop and browsed around while Steve bought us ice cream and found a place to sit to watch Old Faithful. It’s amazing how accurate the geyser is. At the appointed time it started to blow. It blew for more than 3 minutes and the breeze sent the spray on us. It really is a magnificent sight.
It took us at least an hour to get out of the park because of road construction. Twice we shut off the car as we waited our turn to go. Once we were on the road again we had more mountains to climb and twisting roads to drive, but the scenery was beautiful. At one spot all the trees were dead and many were laying on the ground like pick-up sticks. We found out these trees were from a fire in 1988, but very few new ones were growing in their place. It was eerie.
Tonight we’re staying in Cody, WY. Tomorrow we’re sleeping in and at 9am we’re going to take a Trolley Tour of Cody and visit Buffalo Bill’s house and see other interesting things before continuing east towards home.
Another side note: We’re on Mountain Time and I meant to say we lost an hour, not gained it.
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