We missed it. Three times.

Mom and I had a wild hair and decided to have Micah play hookie so that all three of us could go up to Yellowstone Park.  It promised to be a warm, beautiful day, and we just didn't want to miss the opportunity to enjoy nature while it's still decent outside.  I don't usually make it a habit of taking kids out of school, but I just really want to take advantage of doing something fun while I still can - chemo is tomorrow.  Vomit.

On our way up, we stopped at a dance shop in Rigby and I got a new leo, a wrap, and some tights.  I'll post photos of them soon.  My friend Megs is going to take pics of bald me teaching ballet tonight. We are making a photographic journey, the two of us. :)  I'm excited for you to see the pictures.

While we were in Rigby, we stopped at my grandparents' grave.  My grandma had this thing with pennies.  If she saw them on the sidewalk or whatever, she would say, "Someone in heaven is thinking about me!" and pick them up.  When she died, and we were all at the funeral home, my grandpa was just devastated.  He said his last goodbyes at her casket before they closed it, and as he was walking away, there was a penny, right there on the carpet in front of him.  He felt like it was grandma, thinking of him.  Whenever we visited grandma's grave, we put pennies on it.  And now that grandpa has passed on, we continue the tradition.  The grave is scattered with pennies.  So Mom, Micah, and I each put a penny on their grave marker:

We also stopped in Ashton to see this cool plane we saw lying in a field:

We ate pulled pork sandwiches in West Yellowstone and then headed into the park.  We saw some elk and bison on the way in.

 This guy was so massive:

So we got to Old Faithful, and it had just gone off.  We had just missed it, dang it!  So we decided to see some of the other geysers and pools.  My mom wanted so badly to see Morning Glory Pool.  She talked about how blue it was and how pretty it was...Micah was so excited.  He wanted to see that pool.  We had an hour.  We hoped to get to the pool and back in time to see Old Faithful erupt.  We started speedwalking:

We were lucky enough, on the way to Morning Glory, to see Castle Geyser...erupt?  Spew?  I have no idea what the proper term is there.  Sorry about that.  Squirt?  Anyways, that sucker...sprayed?...for like half an hour!  

Micah loved the "rainbow" from the steam:

We only stayed for about five minutes, but that was way too long to linger, because it set us back on our goal of getting to Morning Glory and back to Old Faithful.  So we set off at an even faster walking pace, which my foot was really mad about, to try to make it to Morning Glory.

It took forever, but we finally got there.  

I was dumb and forgot to bring my short lens, so I had my long lens and couldn't get a really good shot: 

And guess what?  It's really not blue.  It's green.  I guess it used to be blue, before tourists started chucking things into it.  Pennies, garbage...  So now it's not blue.  It's green.  Sheesh.  

When we were done at Morning Glory, a.k.a. Not Blue at ALL, we set off at a breakneck speed to reach Old Faithful in time.  My mom's knees are shot, so she waved us on and told us there was no way she could make it, so she decided to take the boardwalk and kind of meander back to Old Faithful Lodge and meet us there.  Micah and I took the asphalt road, which was more of a straight shot.

And oh, the WHINING.  His little legs were tired, which I get.  My foot was killing me.  But he's never seen Old Faithful!!  I really wanted him to get a chance to see it!  So we jogged, speedwalked, jogged, speedwalked, the mile and a half back to Old Faithful.  It went off when we were still just not quite there:

I literally took the above picture while I was frantically running.

By the time we got there, it was done.  Sooo disappointing.

So Micah and I headed to the lodge to recover from our basically 3 mile run/jog and wait for my mom.  We explored the old lodge:

Micah fell soooo in love with it and decided that we needed to spend the night there.  I assured him that we couldn't, because they don't allow dogs (Molly was in the car), they were probably completely booked, Grandma had a tee time the next morning, he couldn't skip any more school, and it was expensive.

None of these things deterred him.  He held on to his hope.  He even approached the lady at the desk and asked if there were any rooms available.  She told him there were two cancellations, and she told him the price.

For him, it was like that part on Dumb and Dumber, where the Jim Carrey character says, "So you're saying there's a chance...!"  When the lady tells him that the chances of she and he getting together were one in a million.

So he impatiently waited for grandma.  He wanted to ask her, confident that she'd say yes and that we'd get to stay in the lodge.  He would walk out the front doors and look around for her every now and then. Once, he walked beyond my eyeshot, so I stood up to go and fetch him back, but then I saw him walking back with my mom.

She told me that he had gone out to the trailhead and screamed, hands splayed back behind him, chest forward, "GWAMMA!!!  GWAMMA!  WHERE AWE YOU??"  And when Mom called back, "Micah!  Micah!  I'm right here!"  He stomped up to her, furious.  He was so mad that it took her so long to get back, and he demanded that we stay in the lodge.  Of course, she told him the same reasons I did for not staying, and he cried and wailed and rolled around on the floor...it was lovely.  

So then she told a little...half truth?  She said, "You know, we can't bring Molly into the lodge.  We'd have to chain her up to a pole by her leash, outside, all alone, all night long.  And then a bear would come and eat her."

That put an end to his whining.

We got some ice cream and started to head out of the park.  We had been driving for maybe 5 minutes when I noticed the time and said, "Well, whaddaya know.  Old Faithful is going off right now."  I had noted the time while we were in the lodge, and then forgotten.  If we had stayed five more minutes, we could have seen the dang thing go off.

Three strikes, and we're out.

Funniest quotes of the day:

Micah had to go potty, and he kept saying, "I have to twinkle!" instead of "tinkle."  And he wasn't trying to be funny.  He really thought that's what you say when you have to pee.  You have to twinkle.

While we were driving out of the park and headed back to West Yellowstone for dinner, Mom said, "I feel like eating something light.  Like a salad....or a hamburger."  I laughed and laughed.  Hamburgers certainly fall under the category of light fare.  I love her.