Hey, all.

I started off today a bit leisurely, as I needed to run a couple of errands, including mailing a parcel, refilling my stores of various groceries, as I was out of bread and cheese, and buying a new thing of toothpaste, as I lost the old one. I took my time getting checked out and ate a late breakfast at the hotel-adjacent diner, where the actual registration desk was, and headed downtown to the post office.

I was stopped several blocks from the post office by road closures, and people sitting in lawn chairs alongside the road. Naturally, I had stumbled headlong into the county fair parade, which had a ton of floats, all of which seemed to be throwing candy to the crowd, which I've never really seen before, and some of which I felt very uncomfortable taking pictures of becaue of the volume of extremely young girls there with their beauty pageant trophies.

I walked to the post office, mailed my parcel, bought some vittles and took off. I had underestimated the amount of time necessary to reach the national parks, it ended up taking about five hours, and I had also anticipated there being a gas station within 100 miles. I barely made it to an extremely overpriced station in mid-Wyoming. I continued on to the Grand Tetons National park after some amazing geological sights, multicoloured and seemingly with an unending variety of patterns. I don't think I was truly able to capture how amazing these looked in the photos, but they were amazing enough that I stopped a couple times just to take shots.

The Parks area was beautiful, starting with Shoshone Forest, and ending with Yellowstone. I should have expected there to be mountain ranges inside the National Park area, but I really didn't think about it one way or another. The park cost more than I thought it would to enter, but it covered both the Grand Tetons as well as Yellowstone, and I didn't know if I was ever going to be there again. Seeing the river that was a large part of the Lewis and Clark expedition story was not only interesting, but breathtaking, as the rapids are visible down in a ravine from where the road lies. It's pretty difficult to get a good shot, and I don't think I pulled it off, but I did get a nice shot of the Lewis Falls.

Yellowstone also had Old Faithful, and I couldn't possibly visit without seeing the eruption. My arrival, at 5:16 was quite fortuitously timed, as the geyser, which goes off approximately every 90 minutes, was scheduled to erupt at 5:22, and started its' eruption quite literally as I got to my place and opened my phone. It's impressive, especially given how high the water goes, but the real notable thing about it isn't that it erupts, it's the regularity and predictability with which it does, and I couldn't stay to test it out in person.

I had decided to end the night in Bozeman, Montana, and take the two days after to make my way over to Seattle. Unfortunately, despite my being there fairly early, there was not a single room to rent in Bozeman that I could find, or in Belgrade, which was fairly close. Talking with a desk clerk revealed that this wasn't even a special occasion, the hotels were just sold out every weekend in this part of the country. I quickly booted up my phone to search for nearby vacancies, and the closest one I could find was a two hour drive away, in Deer Lodge, MT.

I arrived in Deer Lodge around 10:15, and got to my hotel, to see a "No Vacancies" sign buzzing, and a "No rooms in town" note on the door. It looked fairly well-worn, too. Fortunately, I had booked the room from Bozeman on my phone, but I don't think I'll be making that mistake again. If I know where I'm going to end up, I'm going to be booking in advance to avoid this.

Tomorrow, on to Spokane, likely, to make my last three days in the US seem less rushed than they undoubtedly would be otherwise

Cheers!