we wanted to do something together the weekend sadie was in denmark. the only problem was . . . sadie was in denmark and we would miss her! dang it! so we decided to still go do something, but not something she would be sad about missing . . . and camping sounded perfect! there would be many more camping trips to be had so we knew she wouldn't be sad if we went while she was gone. she was having too much fun seeing eiffel towers and castles and mermaids anyway!;)
we had no idea what to do with the dogs while we were gone and decided it would be fun to try taking them anyway, so we loaded the puppers up and hit the road! we decided to go back to yellowstone again, only this time we took the camper too . . . no tents for us this time!;) look at the cute dogs looking out the window, they were excited to get to go this time!
we stayed in a different campground this time. when trav and i stayed in our tent, we went to the bridge bay campground. this time we decided to try the grant village campground! might as well try a few, right?! the campgrounds in yellowstone are huge, i had no idea they had like 300-400 campsites! which sounds awful Lol, but our camping spot was actually great and it wasn't too bad staying in the big campgrounds at all.
the doggies sure didn't mind! melvin's the cutest:)
we were laughing at the kids in the hammocks, if i tried to flip upside down like that, i'd be on the ground for sure!
this pic of lynlee above had me rollin', you're hilarious lynns🤣
how adorable is our little camping setup?! it was so great! and lynlee and melvin were adorable too:)
and pepper;) super adorable;)
we got there early that afternoon so it worked out perfectly to get our campsite all set up and just kind of hang out and do dinner early (we were reminded on our recent tent-camping trip that eating in the dark SUCKS bad Lol;) so we just hung out that evening.
the next day was the fun part . . . we brought the bikes so we could take the kids to lonestar geyser! we were soooo excited to ride that trail again and show them lonestar geyser, it has become one of my favorite yellowstone places ever since i went that first time a year or two ago:) finally, i will have drug the entire family there! . . except for sadie which i know won't ever happen because she's allergic to expending energy in the outdoors;)
and of course we had aiden on board!
it was a great little ride! the kids loved it! lynlee's bike was acting up and giving her grief, so i told her i would ride it on the way back to cheer her back up. little did i know that it was a demon bike and i would feel so broken that i could barely walk after, but it was fine Lol!!!;) we can't have sad kids on such a fun day so i'll take one for the team any time!;)
we got there right as it was going off which was perfect!
we found a great place to leave him and took them down the trails with the cool pools that we found last time, we had to go see "anniversary pool" again!
you can't see it very well in the pic below, but at the edge of the meadow close to the middle, there's a buffalo! i love seeing critters on hikes;)
it was fun to show them our backcountry discoveries!
as we kept going, we found even more!
what a fun area! it's been so fun to go back and see lonestar geyser a couple more times, and then exploring the area and finding even more fun things was such a fun bonus! someday i really want to go backpacking through there, i bet there are so many cool things that barely any people have even seen! i love that even though there are millions of visitors every year, you can still go places and hardly see another soul. it's so peaceful and pretty! yellowstone will forever be one of our favorite places💗
after lonestar, we had an idea . . . there's a loop called firehole lake loop that has been closed for the last year or two so you can't drive it anymore. it has always been one of our favorite places and we've been so sad that every time we go by it the last couple years, it's closed! i had noticed that there were cars parked in front of the gate fairly often so i was like, if they didn't want people back there, there would definitely be signs at this point, so there must just be something wrong with the road and it's just not drivable anymore or something. AND you can have dogs within 100 ft of the roads so we figured we'd check it out and thought it would probably be ok to ride our bikes and bring the dogs! we figured we'd go a little ways and if there were any signs or reasons it seemed like it wouldn't be ok, we could just turn around
so far so good! everything seemed a-ok so we continued our journey!
it was so beautiful! there was only one other set of people walking it so it was quiet and peaceful, and ended up being so much fun!
we even got to see this cool little geyser going off, it felt like such a treat! we don't trust the dogs off their leashes so they got tangled up a little here and there Lol, but the kids thought it was hilarious because they would take off and could totally pull us on our bikes even though we wouldn't totally let them . . . corgis are so crazy! they're such little tanks
it was so much fun to just be able to wander and have the whole place to ourselves! what a gift! we just took our time and took it all in:)
aiders too!
this was a cool little stream that the dogs stopped to get a drink out of. then all of a sudden she took a few steps down it and flopped down right in the water Lol!!! it was so funny! crazy little dog!
aiden would have loved this ride so much! we left his rock at one of our favorite pools. love you so much aiders💗
we ended up going about 3/4 of the way around the loop, which we later learned was about 3 miles. so 3/4 of the way around and then back ended up being a long ways! we figured probably somewhere around 5-6 miles, poor little corgis! that's a loooong ways for corgi legs! they did great though! mellie was running out of gas the last little bit, i was ready to pick her up and heft her the rest of the way, but she hung in there;) good job mells, you're a tough little mutt! pepper too, i think she loved every second of it and had energy to spare, crazy little dog! it ended up being soooo much fun, i'm so glad we checked it out!
somehow after all that, we still had some daylight left so we decided to hike up to the grand prismatic overlook. the kids were like, what's grand prismatic and i was like . . . 🤯
what?! you know grand prismatic! it's like, the whole reason some people go to the whole park! it's a big deal! and they were like . . 🤷
i was appalled and was like OH MY GOSH!!! well that's definitely what we're doing next because you can't keep living life without even knowing what grand prismatic is Lol!!! they've both been there, i guess they were just tiny and didn't remember?! it has gotten way crazy the last few years though so we haven't gone for a little bit, so that makes sense i guess. we were going to fix that though!;)
i love grand prismatic! especially looking down on it from the overlook, it's really cool to walk the boardwalk and take it in up close, but i especially love to be able to see the whole thing from a higher vantage point. it's so pretty!
we even had an aiden rock to leave. love you buddy, we know you'll love it up there until your next adventure!
the next day was going home day, but we had a few hours to play before we had to hit the road.
our campsite was just a short walk away from yellowstone lake so we decided to take the dogs down and check it out. we let them off their leashes (hesitantly) and pepper turned on the afterburners and took off down the lakeshore! we were like CRAAAAAP!!!! pepper just took off on us! but she turned around and ran right back, it was so funny! she was soooo excited, it was adorable! then we threw some sticks in the water for them to swim to for awhile which was also adorable and was mellie's favorite thing of her whole life;)
we also learned that grant village has ice cream and is waaaaay less crazy than getting ice cream at old faithful, which was super good to know! so we got ice cream there and then headed over to old faithful anyway because there was one more bike trail that we wanted to check out. we got there just in time to see old faithful go off (lucky! . . . must be said in napoleon dynamite voice;)
the bike trail starts right in the old faithful plaza and goes to morning glory pool, which is one of my favorite pools in the whole park! i think it's like, 3ish miles roundtrip on a bike, but it was further if you count walking because there were a whole bunch of boardwalks that you could go down and see different things. i honestly don't think we'd ever gone down that bike trail before which was just crazy! it was super busy with a billion people walking and not really any bikes which was funny, but there were some really cool places to see!
there were some really cool geysers and really cool pools
this crazy little geyser was shooting water everywhere! there was a lot of pressure under that little guy! it would shoot a ton of water all over the boardwalk where people stood so the kids stood there and got really wet, it was so funny;) they were giggling and screeching, and me and trav even got hosed a good one once! we giggled and screeched too;)
we eventually meandered our way over to morning glory pool. i love this pretty little pool so much!
we even left aiden by it:)
then we made our way back to old faithful!
what a fun little stop! it was so crazy that we had never walked that before, we've been all over those boardwalks behind old faithful, but never the ones going that direction i guess! and we've been to morning glory pool, just from the other direction! so it was way fun to check out all these cool little places in between that we hadn't been to before! plus it was the kids' first time seeing morning glory pool, so that was definitely worth the ride over, and there aren't many places you can even ride bikes in yellowstone so it's always a treat to find a place that you can! i think we found most of them this weekend!;)
this ended up being such a fun camping trip! it was so fun to take our bikes, and so fun to take the dogs! we found some really fun new places and had such a fun weekend! we missed our sadie lady, but we knew she was having so much fun in denmark and that we'd be back to yellowstone again soon enough;) we could even go back and do all the same things again if we wanted to . . . definitely a perk of living just a couple hours away!;) man we love that place, see you again soon yellowstone!
