Goodbye Yellowstone. Hello Acadia.

As always the week flew by.  Our flight to the east coast is a "red-eye" and that will give us time for a Ranger guided tour of the Old Faithful basin.  Sometime today we will drive from Yellowstone to Salt Lake City and hop an airplane to Portland, Maine to start part two of the vacation, in Acadia National Park with Jesse, Emily, Matt, Eva and grandchildren to be named later.

We love the parks and Yellowstone is gorgeous.  Here are some travel tips.  On this vacation we are staying in the Snow Lodge.  In previous vacations we've stayed in the Old Faithful Inn.  Old Faithful was built as a summer hotel and it still operates that way.  The Snow Lodge was built as the winter hotel, but now operates year round.  To get into your preferred hotel (and ours was and still is Old Faithful) making reservations a year in advance is not too early.  In fact, a year in advance might already find certain rooms, like the ones facing the geyser basin, gone.

The Snow Lodge was built to retain heat.  National Park hotels typically are un-air conditioned.  The West side rooms in the snow lodge, the rooms facing the geysers, are HOT during the summer.  They do not ventilate well.  If you aren't going to need the refrigerator in your room unplugging it will help.  They do provide a fan and we bought some extension cords so it can sit in front of the window to draw in some of that cool night air.  Still, the side of the room with the refrigerator is much warmer than the side of the room near the window.  The rooms on the east side of the lodge are much cooler.

Get up early and get outdoors. It's the best time to tour the park.  Sunrises are spectacular and wildlife is abundant in the early morning.  By 11 AM, the flood of visitors staying outside the park in West Yellowstone make it into the property.  Yesterday, while lunching, we looked out the window at the roads and saw that they were bumper to bumper congested by noon.  We developed an approach of touring through "lunch" and eating that meal late.  Then relaxing or napping.  Then exploring again in the evening through sunset.  By 5 PM a large portion of the car traffic heads back to West Yellowstone.

Mosquitoes are abundant.  Bring bug spray.  Use it liberally.  Yellowstone mosquitoes really are fat, slow and stupid.  They will try and land on you even after the bug spray but they probably will not.

Dress in layers.  The temperature drops down quickly after the sunset.  While we've enjoyed afternoons in the eighties at night we experienced 40 degree temps.  It starts to get much warmer by 11 AM.  Around sunset it's been in the 50's.  Depending on when you visit snow isn't out of the question.  There was a serious snow storm here, virtually a blizzard, the day before meteorological summer.  It doesn't usually snow in July or August, but frost isn't out of the rule book.  Sun block is also helpful.

Respect the wildlife.  The Park Service wants you to stay 100 yards away from bears and wolves and 25 yards from other wildlife.  Obviously with bison using the road system to get around staying 100 yards away from them isn't always possible.  They also lay down next to the elevated hiking trails in the geyser areas.  Just don't try and put your back to a bison who is grazing 10 yards away so that you can take a selfie.  The animals have boundaries.  What it is only that animal knows.  That big hump behind their large heads is shoulder muscle.  They don't look like they can move quickly but they can.  They define their comfort zone.  Your notice will be when they charge you or gore you.

For bears, the worst place you can be is between a momma bear and her cub.  If there is a cub make sure you can see mom and that she isn't behind you.  Hike in groups.  Bears don't really like to mess around with 'gangs'.  We haven't seen a bear this trip.  Wolves and bears are harder to see.  Mule deer, Prong Horn deer, Elk, bison and eagles are fairly easy to find.  Moose are not as easy to see.  Most of the animals spend the summer getting ready for winter.  They do move around freely.  It's not a zoo.

Geyser gazing is fun.  Old Faithful is somewhat predictable.  Hence it's name.  Currently it erupts about every 90 minutes plus or minus 10.  There are published schedules for some of the other geysers too.  They have much greater margin for time error.  Some can be plus or minus two to three hours.  If you want to see the others you will need to put some time into it.

The park is an active volcano.  Did you think Disney engineered all of these interesting thermal features?  Earthquakes are common.  There are some every day.  Most are so small only the monitoring equipment feels them.  There is no evidence of an eruption happening anytime soon.  That can always change, but science does have ways of monitoring the elements that predict eruptions.  While the park changes geologically every day, the threat of a super eruption remains low, as it has for all of our lives, the lives of our grandparents, great grandparents, great great grandparents.  However, the thermal features change the park constantly.  An area we wanted to visit is closed because the soil changed in PH so much the asphalt started to melt.  Geysers stop gushing and become thermal pools or even fumaroles.

All of the parks are great to experience.  Very small children are not likely ready to be here.  If they are you will need to be flexible.

I probably won't post pictures today, although we might have time to kill at the airport.  Otherwise, look for our new adventures in another one of our National Parks next week.