July 28th - Buffalo, WY, to Yellowstone

​Given that we had a short drive - less than three hours - we labored over a slow Internet connection to update more than a week of activity on our travel blog.

Driving west from Buffalo, the land began to look like typical high desert. We drove through the town of Cody, which is a good size city with a lot of tourist attractions, including all things Buffalo Bill and a nightly rodeo. West of town we drove through some tunnels by a hydroelectric dam and discovered a massive reservoir. The high plateaus on either side were reminiscent of the Columbia River between Wenatchee and Chelan. It was quite windy.

We slowly climbed up to the East entrance of Yellowstone - the world's first national park, established in 1872 by Ulysses Grant. Once entering the park, the speed limit dropped to 45 on twisty, two-lane roads. After crossing a peak, the enormous Lake Yellowstone came into view. We had to drive about 30 miles to our campground at Fisherman's Bridge, which was tripled in capacity this year when they opened a sparkling, new 300-site loop for larger RVs. We were grateful to get a spacious pull-through site in the new loop. The orginal loops were crammed tighter than any other campground we have ever seen. Adjacent trailers, aligned rear-to-rear with their front ends facing opposite directions were offset by one-half site width so that their their front doors practically faced each other. It was like they had to share a patio between them. And they are paying the same price as us - nearly $100 per night - the most expensive stay of our trip.

After we got settled in, Angie was eager to take the dogs to a beach that she and her brother, Joe, had discovered on an earlier trip. We piled in the truck and drove a short distance down the western shore of the lake until we found a wide, half-moon, gravelly beach on Gull Point Drive. There was only one other party of two on the beach. On the way back to the campground we saw several large Elk in the woods along the road.