Today we got our geyser fix! We got up (after a little lie in), had breakfast and then began our day of geyser gazing. As we walked into the visitor centre to find out what time Old Faithful was going to blow it filled the window with shooting water and steam so we admired Old Faithful before having a quick look around the visitor centre.

We then started the tour of geothermal activity. Seeing the Lion Geyser, Grotto Geyser, Riverside Geyser and Daisy Geyser all blow. Unlike the geysers in Iceland these seemed to spurt for a longer period of time and be less dramatic. We also admired the geothermal pools and saw lots of different colours formed by the minerals.

After watching the geysers blow we visited the Old Faithful lodge, a spectacular 4 (or possibly 5) storey building made entirely from wood. Walking through the main doors into the atrium was pretty impressive. After admiring the building we ventured to the veranda on the first floor where we had our lunch with a front row view of Old Faithful as she once again blew! This was definitely one of the best picnic views of the trip and we have had many a view to accompany our lunch.

After our lunch on the veranda we got in the bus and drove to the middle basin to see one of the most well known pictures of Yellowstone the Grand Prismatic Spring. Unfortunately as it was a bit of a chilly day there was an awful lot of steam so you couldn't really see the extent of colours. But it was still good to look at and see the other pools too. As it was rather windy it there were a number of blow hats in the geothermals including a rather new looking Stetson!

After middle basin we went to Paint Pots where we saw mud pots and 2 more geysers spasm and fountain which were displaying most of the time we were there.

From here we drove on to Firehole River where we saw a lovely rather classy waterfall. On the way to the waterfall we saw an elk and her baby sitting on the side of a cliff and while we were at the falls we also saw some golden mantled ground squirrels and a red squirrel.

After this, we drove back to Old Faithful where we saw the Castle and Grand geysers displaying. Castle was pretty impressive as it seemed to spurt for a long time and you could just see the water shooting right up. But my favourite has to be grand which was like a choreographed display (a little like Keston fireworks) with timely shots of water each one a little bit more impressive building up to the grand finale. And just as we thought it had finished and started walking away it shot up another massive plume of water and graced us with an encore, which apparently only happens 1 in 3 times, so we considered ourselves very lucky.

From here we went back to our rooms to get ready for dinner. Before dinner I wondered back over to Old Faithful to get a close up view and then went and looked around the village store before being called by Darren across the car park because he had seen something. So we legged it across the car park (which I am now counting as a training run) in the hope it wasn't just a sparrow, only to see an American Marten which came exceptionally close and really was a lovely little creature. While we were watching the marten we also saw a muskrat swimming across the water. So it was a win win!

We then had our dinner before going on a little walk around the area to see what we could find. We saw some red squirrels and heard a grouse but despite our best efforts we just couldn't find it and then we returned to our cabins ready for bed and our final night in Yellowstone National Park before returning to Teton and Jackson tomorrow! Where has that 2 weeks gone??!!