Into the Wilderness

What do you do when you begin to get stir crazy from living behind the zion curtain? Apparently you go Wyoming and get prairie madness. A couple weeks ago a friend and I threw caution to the wind and hit the dusty trail in our trusty rental car. The premise of the trip was to get out of Utah and to see as many weird touristy things as we could.


I personally had never been to Yellowstone. It was amazing! We saw most of the park and because we are proletariat elitists we skipped seeing Old Faithful. We pulled into the LARGE parking lot and couldn't see the geyser due to the large strip malls and huge throngs of people (read- seething masses of humanity), so we skipped it. The rest of the park was fairly empty which was perfect.


It was quite a site to see all that steam and water shooting out of the ground all over the place.


This is me, pulling a Newhouse picture face. I'm actually licking the sulfur of my lips, it makes you young. But seriously, no suitcase smells worse than one full of dirty cloths mixed with the smell of sulfur.


The colors in the pools were real brilliant. As you looked across the Firehole River all you could see on the other side was the steam rising up and reflecting all of the blues and oranges and yellows. (sorry, I'm just not one for taking pictures, they always turn out like crap anyway). FYI- skip Mammoth Hot Springs, it sucks.


From Yellowstone we headed south to Pinedale, Wyoming. Great town! We stayed at the Log Cabin Motel; highly recommended. We had some great food and went to the Mountain Man Museum. We had initially gone to Pinedale to eat at Pitchfork Fondue only to find out that it wasn't open until June. However, we managed to eat ourselves sick in another location, necessitating a midnight run for Tums.


From Pinedale we headed back up through the parks to beautiful, scenic Butte, Montana! There, we went to the World Museum of Mining, the Berkeley Pit and the Radon Health Mine (ask me about that episode sometime). We tried to go the Butte Museum of Prostitution and found it to be closed; very disappointing. We also found out the people in Butte don't eat out.

I paid to look at that.

Now after seeing these pictures you may be asking yourself,"Who in their right mind would rent a car and drive 1600+ miles just to look at those things?" Well, me obviously. The joy really is in the journey. I hadn't laughed so hard for four days straight since the last trip I took. The scenery was really great, and I got to see some more of this vast country. And let's face it, what else have I got to be doing right now? My life is currently like a Simon and Garfunkel song.