Road trip part I: Driving, West Yellowstone, and some of Yellowstone

I'm finally getting my life in order! I finally did my laundry and started packing, so hopefully I'll be ready for my move on Wednesday.
Anyways, I'm trying to post up some of the best pictures from my trip in chronological order. We spent the first two days driving across California, Nevada, and some of Idaho. Unfortunately I didn't take any pictures of Elko, Nevada, where we spent our first night. Elko was pretty weird--a little town full of hotels, small casinos, and Basque restaurants. Apparently they have an annual Basque festival there. We actually ate at one of the Basque restaurants on our way back, but it was mostly American food and omelettes. In Idaho we crossed the Snake River (for the first of about 10 times--that thing crossed the freeway so many times!) on this really cool historical bridge that we wanted to take pictures of, so Matt actually made a U-turn on the freeway. Luckily we were on a tiny freeway in Idaho with no one else, so this wasn't actually dangerous. We were expecting the river to be shallow, but it was in this crazy ravine that looks sort of lame in the picture. It was actually quite high (hence the fence preventing people from climbing down).


Other than the river, Idaho was pretty boring, just lots of flat farmland. When we got to Montana, the terrain changed a lot, and we saw more animals. Right away, we saw two pronghorn antelope, and at our motel in West Yellowstone, we saw a yellow bellied marmot! We didn't know what it was at the time, but we took pictures and looked it up online. It was sitting in the garden of the lady who owned the motel (she lived in the back), and we didn't know if it was her pet, or was wild. It wasn't afraid of people.


We spent two nights in West Yellowstone and one night camping in the park. Probably the coolest part of the sightseeing we did was on the first day, when we hiked around a bunch of geysers and pools. We were really lucky and saw the Grand Geyser go off, which is relatively unpredictable and only goes off twice a day. It shot water up about 200 feet!


My favorite thing was the Emerald Pool, which was a hot spring that was a neat shade of green.


There were also a ton of these funny signs warning people to stay on the paths, since the area around the hot springs were geothermally active. The best part isn't the kid getting his feet burned, but the woman to the left (his mother?) who's upset about it. Every time I saw this sign I wanted to laugh.


That's all for now! I'll post more Yellowstone pictures later!