We originally planned to spend several days touring Yellowstone, but instead we spent most of our Yellowstone time in the trailer feeling terrible. After Mom came down with COVID earlier in the week we had hoped that Dad and Remy would avoid the worst of it. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case. We drove to our campground outside of Yellowstone on Thursday evening and got things set up without a hitch (well, just the hitch on our trailer). Friday morning Dad work up with a headache, and it felt like a herd of buffalo were running through his head. The headache was followed up by several bouts of dry heaving.
Being sick in the trailer is already not a ton of fun, but our troubles were compounded by the fact that we were scheduled to drive to the other side of Yellowstone that morning to our next stop. Luckily, Mom is basically a superhero and was able to find us the last site at a separate RV spot just a mile down the road. In addition, she was able to head into Yellowstone and stop at the Mammoth Hot Spring clinic to get Paxlovid to help with Dad's Covid. Hurray. We spent the next 24 hours huddled in and around the trailer as Remy had also developed a fever. Let's skip forward a bit to more pleasant times.
Saturday evening everyone was feeling well enough to drive into the park. We had to leave the dogs back at the trailer so we only explored a bit of the Northwest section of the park. Our first stop was the Mammoth Hot Springs to check out a small boardwalk and take in some of the very interesting features that the hot springs create. This was our first chance to see how the geothermal bacteria created a lot of different colors in the water. It looks like each of the streams has a tiny coral reef growing inside of it.
After the walk we drove a bit toward the Northeast section of the park, which we would no longer get to explore extensively given our delays. We were hopeful that we would see a one or two buffalo up close, but unfortunately that would not be the case. Rather, we saw a whole herd cross about two inches from our car. Had we been daring and stupid, we could have petted them. We passed by a few lone buffalo on our drive, but they were quite far from the road and hard to get a good picture of. Eventually we rounded a corner and had to stop as a herd was crossing the road. We were the first car to stop travelling in our direction, so we were about as close as possible (probably 15 yards away). The park ranger ushering the buffalo herded them in our direction, and the buffalo decided that the road was the best place for walking. We were already stopped so they passed right next to us. The whole herd took a nice lazy stroll around our car before eventually heading up into the hills behind us. We were doubly lucky to be the first cars to get stopped as a lot of the cars that were stopped in the other direction didn't even get to see the buffalo that were causing the huge traffic jam. Bummer.
We drove a bit more, saw a few more buffalo, and then headed back to the dogs and the trailer for dinner.
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