Rewind - August 13, 2015

We survived the night at the Snow King in Jackson. We woke up to loud music extremely early. Someone must have complained, because that didn’t last long. Then there was some other buzzing noise that was also short lived (may actually have been Tony snoring now that I think about it). Finally all the folks waking up and moving about forced us to get up. None of us were too eager to get out of bed.

We checked out the town of Jackson for the morning. We had breakfast and then did some window shopping. Jackson has some really cool little shops with very unique (and quite expensive) items. We got to see dead stuffed animals of all the things we had hoped to see in Yellowstone.

The town itself is set up like an old western town. There was a stage coach that rode folks around the main square. The square itself has the four corners marked with an elk horn arch. They are huge! The local boy scouts gather and sell the horns to the town to raise money from the local elk refuge. It’s a very neat idea.

We headed back to Denver and had a fairly long drive ahead of us. None of us were really in the mood to get in the car for such a long journey. But as we drove out, we had the Teton Mountain range on the right side of us and the Rockies on the left. It was a beautiful drive. The wide open spaces of Wyoming are beautiful. We drove nearly the full height and width of it on our return.

The last leg of the trip was the same exact road we had left out on. It was funny how in the short amount of time that we had traveled through there, we already had made funny memories. We passed the McDonald’s that Cass had to eat at. We passed the gas station where we partially filled up because Tony nearly ran us out of gas. We passed the section of land where we argued about plateaus, mesas, and buttes. Good times and good memories.

The thing we kept saying was how impossible it felt that we had accomplished so much in the ten days since we had been on the road going in the other direction. We traveled over 4400 miles, saw 7 national parks, went through seven different states, and saw two major cities. We sea kayaked (but saw no whales), saw quite a lot of different wildlife, and did an Eskimo plunge into a glacier river.  We laughed, ate, drove, and took hundreds of pictures. Fortunately, we also didn’t kill each other.

We made it into Denver and Tony’s sweet Aunt Maxine insisted we stay at her house while she and Uncle Jack went back east for a short trip. We took advantage of their complex’s hot tub and swimming pool after dinner. It felt great to soak in the hot water. We all crashed for the night, knowing we’ll have a busy day tomorrow of more sight seeing.