We made it!  A lot more driving than planned, but we made it.

We got into the park and stopped at the first visitors center to use the restroom and to get a sticker for the cargo box.  As we got out of the car we noticed that there was a herd of elk on the lawn.  When we came out of the visitors center, the elk decided to cross the parking lot.  The park rangers would not let us go to our car because that would require us to go in between the herd.  He told us we had to wait until the entire herd crossed.  Any other time I would have been thrilled to watch the elk but we had limited daylight left and still had a ways to go to see Old Faithful.  Seems like they took their precious time but they all crossed after stopping to sniff our bikes on the back of the car.

Thanks to the elk, we missed the eruption of Old Faithful by 5 minutes!  We did however get to see Beehive Geyser erupt.  It only happens every 8-24 hours.  We did not stay for the next Old Faithful eruption because it would have been after dark.

We also stopped at the Grand Prismatic Pool.  It was really neat.  I think that because it was so cold outside, the steam from these pools was really visible.  This made seeing the colors in the pools a little harder.  Still very pretty.

With the very last bit of daylight left, we stopped to see a waterfall on the drive out of the park.

We didn’t get to spend as much time as we had hoped in Yellowstone, but we are very glad that we got to see what we did.  We will eventually make another trip to this park.  There is so much to see.  So after 15 hours of driving, we made it to our room for the night.   Next stop, Everett, Washington!