The Yellowstone Trip: Three Years in the Making (Part One)

When I first began to write about our troop’s trip out to Yellowstone this past summer, I planned to include all of it in one post.  But as I started going through the pictures, I realized there would be absolutely no way to try to sum it up in one post and do it any justice.  I could write an entire book about the trip.  So I’m breaking it up into multiple ones, but even still, I know I won’t come close to describing what Yellowstone is all about and our experiences.  I don’t know how many blog posts this will take, but I hope you will join me for the ride!  I’m going to include only the best pictures and not overload you with too many because I don’t want to turn this into a flashback from the 70s wherein visitors to a home are subjected to the couple pulling out their vacation slides and making them sit through grainy images up on a wall.  But one of these days I do plan on creating a photo album on Shutterfly.   Picking out which few photos to share here will probably be the hardest part of this blog series. 

Back in the spring of 2016, I told our second year Juniors that if they stayed in Girl Scouts through the end of their Cadette years, we could go on a big trip.  I asked them to think BIG.  They suggested trips like the beach or Atlanta.  I said think bigger.  One of them mentioned off the cuff, “Yellowstone National Park!”  I said, “Yes, THAT kind of big.”  All of their eyes got wide.  So I said, “Let’s do it.”

That next fall, I put together Cadette handbooks for each of the girls in the troop.  To prove what I said in the previous paragraph, you can read that Cadette handbook blog post and see where I mentioned the inclusion of the Yellowstone trip.  Here it is, in fact:

At the time, 2019 seemed like a long way off.  But it came quickly.  One Junior dropped out at the end of 2016.  In the first year of Cadettes, we merged with another troop and I gained a Cadette co-leader.  Hooray!  She brought two girls but one dropped out that fall.  We picked up another girl who had moved from another council.  Two girls from the Original 5 dropped out the end of the first Cadette year, and then another one dropped out the end of the second.   We picked up two who switched troops before the second year of Cadettes ended, leaving us with five girls at the end of the 2019 membership year.  One didn’t go to Yellowstone, so of the four girls that went, only my daughter was left of the Original 5 who decided on Yellowstone in 2016.  I’m sure it would have been much more exciting to say all five of them stayed the entire three years, but I’m just being honest!

In the winter and spring of 2018, we walked the girls through researching costs and options for travel and lodging just to give them an idea of what kind of money we would be spending.  We had been saving money since the first year of Cadettes, but we had given them an update and wanted to really start driving it home that we were going to have to give this the fundraising emphasis that it needed (meaning we needed to sell a LOT of cookies).  Cheryl took the lead on planning the trip (because she’s good at it and I am not!), and in August of 2018, we sat down together and booked the reservations.  It was REAL!

Fast forward to this past summer.  Everyone had a busy week to the days leading up to our departure on Sunday, July 28th.   All six of us (4 girls, 2 leaders, and Cheryl’s oldest daughter) arrived at the Greenville-Spartanburg airport at dark thirty for take off.  Pictures were taken by parents.  We prepped the girls who hadn’t flown before with what to expect when flying.  We checked in our one “troop” suitcase for overflow and each of us had one carry on.  We got up to security.  And… one of the girls was pulled off to the side by security for a pat down.  Yep.  I was there watching as the guardian.  Apparently there was a false positive in a certain area where there was nothing – not even a pocket.  They let all of us go, and we headed off to wait at the concourse.

Boarding time!  We all got on the airplane and it began to rumble down the runway.  You know that very brief downward push before you lift off?  Well, right when we hit that point, the plane slammed on the brakes and the engines reversed full blast.  The thought “Are we going to have enough runway to stop?” briefly flashed through my mind.  We slowed down, and everyone on the plane was silent as we taxied back to the concourse.  The pilot came over the speakers and explained what happened.  Basically, there was a bird strike, and according to the pilot, it was a “million in one shot” wherein the bird damaged one of the instruments, and the pilots had to make a split second decision whether to abort the takeoff or take a risk and keep going.  They erred on the side of caution which we were all appreciative of.  But, that meant we missed our connecting flight, and after trying to figure out options with a ticket agent for an hour and a half, we realized we had no choice but to fly out the next morning.

So, we arrived that Monday morning at an even earlier dark-thirty and boarded for Take Two.  Off we went!  I won’t bore you with too many details, but we had a smooth flight with one layover and flew into Bozeman, MT.  Once we picked up the van we had reserved (but had to come back and report a flat tire before we left), we picked up food and supplies at the local Walmart and hit the road to Yellowstone.  Being from the South, the landscape was so different than what we were used to that it was almost surreal.  The open and flat fields where you could see right up to the base of the mountains were amazing. We stopped at a Wendy’s and saw a bald eagle sailing overhead.  Wow!  And the weather was BEAUTIFUL!  It felt great coming from a very hot and humid Southern late July summer to the crisp weather of the West.  Before we even got to Yellowstone, there were some sights that made us stop:

We stopped at the famous entrance way on our way to Mammoth Springs.  WE WERE REALLY HERE!  As we were coming in, I realized the girls were the same age that I was when my troop growing up (Troop 20) visited Yellowstone on our way to National Center West.  And here I was as a leader bringing our troop back.  It was hard to wrap my mind around that.

Just to give you a little detail about how we went about this trip, we originally booked the Roosevelt Cabins for both Sunday and Monday nights and then at the Old Faithful Lodge Cabins Tuesday through Thursday.  Friday would be spent at a hotel in Bozeman since our flight out was on Saturday.  We decided to stay in the park for convenience’s sake – and boy, did it pay off.  We were able to get up early and beat the crowds since we didn’t have to include travel time from the entrances to the attractions.  I would highly recommend going this route if you go to Yellowstone.  Just know that you’ll have to make reservations at least a year if not more in advance in order to book what you want.

As for food, we decided to stock up on easy meals for breakfast to eat in our cabins and packed lunches for the day to save money.  We could then splurge on special treats such as ice cream (more about that later!) and for a nice dinner.  We ended up saving much more than we had anticipated!

Our first stop in Yellowstone was Mammoth Hot Springs.  I’m not going to go into the history or geology of the sights of Yellowstone as you can find a much more in-depth and detailed explanation in a book, but I just wanted to share a few highlights:

During our visit at Yellowstone, we used an app called Gypsy Guide.  Cheryl ran it from her phone hooked up to a small bluetooth speaker so that we could hear it throughout the van.  I would recommend it, although sometimes the man’s voice got on my nerves a tiny bit because he was a little too folksy at times.  But that may have been because I was grumpy since I’m not a morning person.  However, it does give you great tips to avoid crowds and fills you in on some information that you wouldn’t necessarily have gotten from a tour guide or park-provided maps.  It works off of the location of your phone, so when you near an area, it triggers whatever script applies.  During the longer drives between the main areas of the park, it shares something in general about the park such as the return of the wolves.  We also used the Hamilton’s Guide I picked up back in 1987 during my first trip to Yellowstone with Troop 20.  Sure, it’s a little dated, but it also contained things you’d miss if you only went by the maps and basic guides.

After visiting Mammoth, we then headed off towards Tower Junction.  We stopped a couple of times to see the Petrified Tree and Undine Falls along with taking a beautiful side road called Blacktail Plateau Drive.  A few times we did wonder if we had gone off-road towards nowhere.

We then arrived at the Roosevelt Cabins for a night’s stay.  We ate dinner at the Lodge at about 11pm our time (Eastern).  The lack of sleep over the past two nights coupled with our service unit’s City Slickers camp which ended the day before our trip finally caught up to me, and I was so tired I was giddy.  I’m not sure what I said but everybody was laughing.  Here are some shots from the Roosevelt Lodge.  And what was this?  A working phone booth?  Service was very spotty in that area hence the booth.  I explained to the girls how it worked back in the day and they just stared.  I felt old.

The Roosevelt Cabin we stayed in (if I remember correctly) had two full size and two twin beds so we could all pile into one.  I am normally a very light sleeper and don’t deal with snorers very well, but I was so tired I slept through the night.  We got up the next morning and hit the road where is where I’ll take up with Part 2!