Given the iconic images of Old Faithful we’ve seen all of our lives, we have been looking forward to the day we would finally see it with much anticipation… but today did start out pretty humbling!
The campsites at Yellowstone are beautiful, but rustic. There are no water or electric hook-ups, so we have to run off of a generator and use the water pump to get the basics to run in the RV. And, unfortunately, our little RV shower has proven woefully insufficient for the 7 of us – both because of the amount of time it takes to run 7 showers and because it can only offer us 8 gallons of hot water at a time (then we have to wait for the water to heat up again). By the time we arrived at our new campground here at Yellowstone – Madison Campground - Steve went to ask about other shower options. Surprisingly, he was told that the campers at Madison were assigned to the Old Faithful Inn to take showers at $3 a pop.
This was not really such great news! I mean, this was the hotel we had planned to stay in for this trip before we ended up veering off-course and going with the RV…. So clearly we like it very much and knew that the showers would be very nice. But we weren’t really looking forward to pulling our RV up to the Old Faithful Inn and trudging our unshowered selves up to the front desk to ask for a three buck shower! But, oh well….
So we drove up to this regal-looking circa 1903 gabled-roof inn, with all of its flags waving from the widow’s walk, and we entered through its heavy, iron-studded front doors… with each of us clad with a small backpack full of shampoo and soap and clothes for the day. The lobby area is an open 7-story space with a commanding stone fireplace in the center and hand-wrought wooden balconies all the way around the periphery. The carved wooden front desk is off to the left, situated next to the large open windows that offer some of the best views of Old Faithful. And so now, here we are…. standing in one of the most beautiful and most photographed destinations in the park…. begging for a shower! But, fortunately, the woman at the front desk met our request with rote familiarity, as I did have some concerns that perhaps we were joining that very slim number of people who actually took the Inn up on its offer to take in the tired, the poor, the huddled masses, yearning to breathe free, from Madison Campground....
Because the Inn is so old, the rooms in the oldest sections, which are also the most beautiful, do not have their own bathrooms. And so these were the bathrooms in the Inn to which we were led. Regardless of my paid admission to these glistening marble shower rooms, however, I just couldn’t help but feel like an intruder when another woman brought her small child in as well… only to realize that we were occupying all three of the showers located there and that they would be in for a little bit of a wait. Although I was trying to hurry to reduce their wait time, I did take a bit of comfort in the fact that at least she really had no way of knowing that we were not guests of the Inn as well… or at least, that is, until Katie mentioned something about her clothes for the day, and Grandma chimed in, “Don’t worry, we can get you something else when we get back to the camper!” Oh man! My cover was blown to smithereens! Ha. In any event, I never ended up actually seeing this woman and her child, as they left either to go to the other shower room down the hall…. or to report the vagrants? LOL.
But the “fun” wasn’t quite over, unbeknownst to me. What was “knownst” to me was that I had heard a thud while we were driving yesterday (one of what seems like 200 thuds of various things that have fallen while the camper was in motion over the past 10 days), and this particular thud had been identified to me as the cabinet door popping open in the bathroom and my hair dryer tumbling out of it. Oh well… standard procedure…. Just shove that baby back in. But, in fact, this particular “thud” was different…. OH SO VERY DIFFERENT! Long story short, as I turned on my hair dryer, for what could not have been more than a few seconds, the entire room filled with the foul smell of what one could only assume was burning pee! Disgusting, disgusting, disgusting…. Oh my! The fact the the "thud" was actually a "splash" in the toilet, was information I needed to have earlier! Now I would have to go scrub that whole cabinet and everything inside it with bleach or something!!! Ugh!
Shortly after we returned to the RV to put away our things, a couple of bison decided that the grass RIGHT OUTSIDE our main door looked particularly appealing. We really could have reached out and touched one of them without even stepping outside the door! The head of these bison were so enormous that neither of them could have poked their head through the width of our door if they wanted to, but our quick-thinking, ever-fearless Grandma wasn't going to take ANY chances so she promptly closed the screen door. You know, because how could a 2,000 pound bison possibly get through a screen door, right? Ha.
So, other than the shower and our brief hostage stand-off with those two bison, we actually did some other things today! Like seeing Old Faithful erupt 200 feet in the air on four different occasions (it erupts every 60- to 90-minutes), and each time with hundreds and hundreds of other folks who were lined up on the boardwalk and sitting in the wooden bleachers that surround it. In our experience, there is absolutely nothing else at Yellowstone, or any National Park we have visited, that comes close to getting as much attention and foot traffic as Old Faithful. In addition to the number of people that were there, we were shocked by the number of buildings that have been erected around it! Of course, there was the Old Faithful Inn – which I have already well over-described – but also the Old Faithful Lodge, the Old Faithful Snow Lodge, the Visitor Center, a yet-to-be-completed-and-much larger new Visitor Center, 2 General Stores, and other smaller stores and buildings as well. Just crazy! Here’s hoping that none of those 2- to 3-thousand annual earthquakes at Yellowstone upsets the balance of Old Faithful’s plumbing, rendering it a mere bubbling puddle as has happened to so many other geysers at the park! That would be dreadful on so many levels!
The reason that we were able to see Old Faithful erupt so many times is because there are so many other things to do in the area. We hiked around the hot springs area that surrounds it for quite a while, which included Castle Geyser (a geyser I am highlighting because it really does look like a castle structure that continually emits steam, although it also erupts with a fountain of water twice per day). We also did a little shopping and lingered over lunch at the Old Faithful Lodge, which gave us another opportunity to see Old Faithful blow it’s top over dessert. In addition, the kids once again completed the requirements for, and were awarded, their Yellowstone Jr. Ranger badges and patches at the Visitor Center right there at Old Faithful.
I don’t know if it is because the Jr. Ranger requirements were more rigorous here than in most of the other national parks or what, but the Park Rangers made a pretty big deal about it. They went through the worksheets with each of the kids, asking them some pretty hard questions, and then they asked for everyone’s attention at the Visitor Center as they introduced each of our newly commissioned Yellowstone Jr. Rangers to them! It’s also worth mentioning that our youngest, Mark -- who at this point is sporting an official “Yellowstone Jr. Ranger” army-green vest at all times -- is known for his wise-beyond-his-years commentary whenever an adult asks him a simple question. So this vest thing has opened us up to all kinds of funny situations, with adults stopping him to ask about his vest and Mark spouting off about some relatively obscure Yellowstone fact or using some 5-syllable word the adult may not happen to use themselves (ha!). As a result, just following Mark around these days has created an endless source of amusement, as we get to bear witness to these intermittent, but predictably frequent, interactions with random Yellowstone visitors our family comes across...
We also had a reservation for dinner at the Old Faithful Inn, so yes I did actually have to show my face in there again – ha! But no one seemed to be staring or pointing and, even if they had been, it would have been worth it! We all thoroughly enjoyed the great, historic, western-themed dining room, with etched glass windows overlooking the park and it’s comfortable lodge atmosphere. Oh yeah, and we liked the food too. Ha. It was hard to leave at the end!
After dinner we had a great surprise in store for the kids… a guided tour in a 1938 “Old Yeller Bus.” These yolk-yellow antique touring buses were used in Yellowstone in the 1930s, only to be completely retired in the 1960s. But eight of these classic “buses”, which are really more like antique station wagons on steroids with roll-back tops, were completely restored and returned to service at Yellowstone in 2007. We happened to end up in the bus named “Hollywood” – referred to as such because it had enjoyed a starring role in the movie “Big Trouble in Little China” during the period of its abandonment by Yellowstone.
Old Yeller took us past some beautiful waterfalls in Firewall Canyon and also paused so that we could get a great pic of an elk with a very impressive rack of antlers. But our luckiest site was a geyser (the name of which currently escapes me) that happened to be erupting as we came upon it – over and over again. The eruption was a little later in the day than was predicted for this geyser, so we were one of the few visitors there. It also happened to be one of those rare geysers that continues to erupt for approximately one hour once it gets started, so we chose to get out of the bus and hang out to watch it for a little bit (Old Faithful, by comparison, erupts for only 2 to 5 minutes at a time).
It was a perfect ending to a great day, however imperfectly it may have began....
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