Day 21, 7th September 2011. Yellowstone National Park

Had to leave camp by 6.30am this morning, the earliest by far. It was all so we could see some wild animals though so it was totally worth it. It was SO COLD this morning, I had so many clothes on plus I was wrapped in our bed blanket and I was still freezing. The first thing we did was stop to take photos of the beautiful sunrise.

 Then we stopped off at another volcanic area, with geysers and pools.

As you can see, I was so cold!

We of course really wanted to see some animals. We saw 1 Bison in a field but couldn't really see it properly because it was so foggy outside, then all of a sudden there were hundreds and hundreds of Bison walking down the road. It was a massive heard f them, all the cars had to stop while they just wandered down the road, it was so cool. I couldn't believe how big their heads were, the were so huge. They were completely comfortable around the cars and just acted as if we wasn't there, they were coming right up to the van, so we got some good photos. We saw some really cute baby ones playing together too which was so sweet. It took about 10 minutes for all the Bison to pass by, thats how many there were.

Afterwards, we drove around a bit more to see some more Yellowstone scenery.

Pretty waterfall

Stopped at a store later on in the morning to have a look around and buy some stuff, and got an ice cream too. While we were there we also got changed into our swimming stuff because we were going to the hot springs.

The hot springs we went to was called the Boiling River. It's a place where naturally heated water that's really hot meets cold water in the same place, so you can be in the water and be really hot on one side and freezing on the other. We had to walk about 15 minutes from where we parked the van to find the place to get in. It was an area made into a kind of pool made by rocks, because the current is really strong it can drift you away. When we got in the water it was so weird, to feel the hot and cold currents swirling together, it was constantly changing so 1 second you were in hot water and the next second in cold water.

We stayed in there for about an hour, it was so difficult to get out because the rocks were so slippery that we kept falling over, it took me and Kirsty ages to get back across to the exit.

The rest of the afternoon was spent driving around a few more spots in Yellowstone looking at the scenery. We stopped at a lake too which was really nice and peaceful because there was nobody else there so we just relaxed there for a while, while the boys played throwing stones in the lake.

Got back to camp in the late afternoon, and Art drove us down to the showers so we didn't have to walk. We had to pay for the shower, but I still had a nice long one and washed my hair then met Gary outside and we walked back to camp. 

The evening was pretty uneventful, we waited for dinner and talked about maybe all getting tattoos in Chicago. Lauren taught us all how to make smores on the campfire after dinner. We went to bed pretty early at 9.30pm because there wasn't much else to do and we were really tired from being up so early.