Saturday July 19th

Departure: Thompson Falls, MONTANA

Arrival: Canyon Village Yellowstone National Park, WYOMING

Strating our second day of real driving and camping. We felt good as our first big day had gone so well. But well you are apt to have some hard times and the end of this day was hard.

Morning started off with Bryce snapping pics of the campsite in the wee hours. Bryce is really in his hay day camping. He rarely has a smile on this face. Rachel is doing pretty good Im sure surprising the her family. Some of the pics you see of Rachel are early in the morning not to be confused with how she looks all the time camping.

So the infamous moose that was calling all night made a couple noises in the morning so we decided to go for a walk along the river and search for it. We searched for this moose for half an hour by the time it seemed like 3 moose were calling and we were being surrounded. Bryce's theory of it being a moose was slowly fading and Rachels new theory of bull frogs was getting stronger.

Driving thru Montana was quite amazing great mountains and fields and rivers. Some crystal blue. So fun for horse back riding.As we knew today was a bit of a drive we felt the need for a small adventure and Rachel really wanted to check out this Ghost town just south of Missoula. It didn't seem like a huge detour. Um Well this is the adventure of the day. The further we got down this road which didn't really have a name the higher we got and then the road turned to logging roads. The signs were very good and clear so we knew this place existed but there was no other traffic and well we were basically scaling a Montana mountain. The car was SO good. Oh and Bryce was excellent at driving it. But our heart rates both went up when we started seeing signs saying SAFE ZONE NO SHOOTING. Oh well that's good now. But does that mean all that time we WERE in a shooting zone. Eeeek get us Outta here. Eventually we did come across a real ghost town and it was packed with Tourists. Bryce couldn't believe how many people there were …where the heck were they when we were driving. OH they took the other road. The one Rachel wanted to take but Bryce wanted to go up the steep hill to see a cave. LOL! Needless to say it was very much an adventure and the ghost town was really neat.

WE made it to Yellowstone National Park which we were very pleased with. We knew it might be a bit tricky to find a campsite as you cannot reserve most of them its just first come first serve. As we passed our first pic Mammoth Hot Springs Campground and it said full we figured this could be tricky. Once we came to our third or fourth campground Canyon Village. We though hey lets go in and see if they can tell us what might still be available. We quickly learned that if you show your sweet Canadian smile you can get a campsite right then and there. We were in desperate need of our home for the night and some food. But a new adventure popped up. BUGS. Wyoming has the biggest misquitos I (Rachel) have ever seen in my life. They were SO HUGE and ennoying. We decided we really wanted to stay in Yellowstone another night at a different campsite and enjoy the park.

OH My goodness I almost forgot to mention our animal sighting while driving thru the park. We were taking turns guessing which animal we were going to see next but I think the best was a hue Bison leading theline of cars we were in down the road. He was so big. He went right up to the cars and said hi. Can't wait to explore this Park tomorrow as it has such a variety of sights. Canyons, Water Falls, Animals, Geysers, Lakes it just goes on and on.