Day 14: Jackson, WY

This morning, we headed to Yellowstone to get some proper photos of Old Faithful.

Isn't that better?

Then we went to the Tetons!  They are very majestic.

Getting to the Tetons may have been my favorite part.  You go up and down these big rolling hills in Idaho at 60mph and it's like being on a rollercoaster except most rollercoasters don't have potato fields for scenery.  On the way, we passed towns with populations of 250 and whose major shops included Billy Joe's Taxidermy.  We also went to a supermarket to try to get Alex some cough medicine and drove by a woman riding a horse through the parking lot.  It was surreal.

Next you go up a winding road into the mountains, and then you go down a winding road.  The winding road down has a ton of signs like "Trucks: test brakes" and "Trucks: 10% grade" and "Trucks: Maybe you should just run around" (ok I made that one up).  There are also a few  "runaway truck ramps" which are just these big uphill ramps off the side of the road that you can drive your truck into if you lose control if it, and then you can cry, because there's really no way out of the runaway truck ramp that I can see, there isn't even room to turn your truck around.  (Hopefully your truck doesn't just roll right back down the ramp.)

But finally, all this takes you to Jackson, Wyoming!  Alex was pleasantly surprised by the $500/night hotels and $100/head restaurants in this town of 10,000 people and apparently had no idea that this was a ski resort town...fortunately May is not a big month for skiing so we were able to find a hotel that did not cost $500 a night.  We headed to Teton National Park and got good views of the mountains, Jenny Lake, the Snake River, etc. and I learned all about Beaver Dick Leigh who surveyed the Tetons and had a wife and six children who all died of smallpox.  We didn't see any elk because it was too warm (they like the mountains this time of year) but apparently they come out in force during the winter.

Oh, I almost forgot, this is what the city park entrances in Jackson look like (yes, those are real antlers, collected by Boy Scouts, apparently?)

At night, Alex wanted to see the stars, so we did!  It was a bit difficult to identify things, but we did spot Venus, which is apparently especially bright this time of year, and Alex enjoyed looking at stars with his binoculars.  I sometimes read in books about a full moon or a new moon and this having an effect on characters' traveling at night, and wondered, really?  Does the moon make that big of a difference?  Well, I can now tell you that the answer is absolutely yes.  The supermoon was out, and it was HUGE and ORANGE and incredibly bright, and even without much cloud cover, it ended up never getting truly dark...you could never not see the mountains, or your hand in front of your face, etc. even with no other light sources.

The phone didn't do a great job photographing it, but it does kind of give you the idea of how bright it was