DAY 13 - Some Old Geyser

For our second day in Yellowstone National Park and surrounding areas, we began with a breakfast of waffles and juice/coffee, before taking the drive back from St Anthony to the park. Taking the southwards route through the park, we very quickly saw our first ever geysers!

We stopped at the lower basin to view some geysers, which came in all shapes and sizes (and bad smells!). Beautifully blue water sending columns of steam into the sky, how wonderful nature is!

In addition to the geysers at the basin, we also saw the fountain paint pots: pools of mud type liquid bubbling ominously and again steaming. 

 One other excitement at the basin was some sparring Buffalo! As you can hopefully see in the photo below, 2 were in a kind of headbutt joust competition, running around the plain. No buffalo were injured in the making of this blog.

After the lower basin, we drive on past more geysers, headed to the most famous of all: Old Faithful. This geyser erupts with water every 90 minutes on average and with our luck at Rushmore before, we thought it unlikely we would get to see it. However, on arrival we saw scores of people waiting around the barriers and within 3 minutes we got to see the geyser erupt! A tower of water was thrown up about 3 storeys in the air, surrounded by steam. It certainly was very impressive and we high fived for our good arrival time! 

In celebrtion, it was certainly lunch time! Making some microwave ramen at the local store, we grabbed some apples for dessert ad head off to Yellowstone Lake. Here we took a brave trip down a steep hill to stand by the lake shore, which was vast. We even got to see a miniature hot spring up close!

After the lake we took a trip out of Yellowstone and into Grand Teton national park just south. We visited a relatively famous town called Jackson Hole which we hoped might be full of interesting history but in fact turned out to be full of uninteresting tourist rubbish! We speedily went onwards towards our destination for the night of Idaho Falls, with Jessie tackling her first mountain to drive up and down (I did excellently, of course). We decided it would be silly to visit Idaho Falls without seeing any falls so we took an evening walk from the river bank outside our hotel down to the falls, which were rather impressive, especially as we could stand on a ledge right at the drop. 

After steak for dinner, we have returned to our room as usual to book accomodation, and of course blog!