Day 62 - A Great Day For The Irish

Well we didn’t need to drive terribly far to get to Yellowstone, and because the majority of the park was closed off (including Old Faithful), there was only a limited things that we could do. We got to sleep in until about 10 and then we hit the road.

Along the way we saw beautiful landscape and Emma and I both started to fall in love with Montana. I was literally picturing an wide open plain with no one around and tumbleweed blowing across our path every 30 feet. But it was very inhabited with people and it didn’t look like the places we were driving through were run-down.

We got into the park in Montana and after driving for five minutes we were in Wyoming! Now I don’t want people to think that we weren’t going to get the full experience of the Yellowstone National Park because a lot of it was closed off. The park itself is as large as the states of RI and DE combined! That’s ginormous!!! If you ever some here for a visit, allow yourself almost a full week! You would literally have to cover the area of miles and miles of road to get to different parts of the park.

Well Emma and I grabbed a map at the gate and found a trail that looked fun. About a half-mile into the trail, we were in knee high snow. Apparently not all the trails of the accessible parts of the park were good for hiking. They did however have a good couple of miles of boardwalks. We were in the area of the hot springs. Now when I went to Costa Rica with my father, I was lucky enough to go swimming in a hot spring. The hot springs at Yellowstone were not the swimming kind. They were much more raw and natural. The fact that it was a bit chilly in the mountains was nice because you could see the steam coming from the springs very easily and it appeared very thick, even from far away.

We looked at the forecast and it was supposed to rain in the early afternoon, but we were able to get about an hour of rain-free day. It started to rain when we were walking along a river that if you travel about half a mile, there is a swimmable area 365 days area because of the spring water. We didn’t get to make it in time, but when I dipped my hand from a half-mile down river the water was still pretty warm.

Like every Irish American in the U.S. we chose to celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day with a typical Italian dinner. I was craving some lasagna and I personally didn’t want to celebrate St. Patty’s day with strangers who like to pretend they are Irish.

Oh well, I’ll have some green beer next year.

Aramis

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Day 61 - Life In The Fast Lane

So sadly our first stop the next morning was to the airport. Unfortunately Andy didn’t think it was financially beneficial for him to stay with us on the trip. I also think he just was getting anxious to get home. So Emma and I dropped him off at the airport and said goodbye to 1/3 of the three musketeers.

We needed to keep moving though. With only two people now, it was just Emma and I taking turns with driving. What is crazy about Seattle is that even though it is so north in the U.S., there is a lot of rain. Well, once we drove about 40 minutes west of the city (on a not so familiar I-90) there was a crazy blizzard a little further up into the mountains. It didn’t cause too much delay on our drive, but once get got out of the blizzard there was some of the craziest fog I had ever driven through. Lastly only an hour of getting through the fog, there was more rain, and once we got through more rain, there was beautiful sunshine! Where’s Al Rocher with the forecast when you need him!

Well there was also another surprise as I was driving. I learned the hard way that the state of Washington enforces their speeding by airplanes. Yeah so it turns out it took me 61 days to get the first speeding ticket. But it wasn’t just me getting pulled over. I think they were trying to get their quota up because three cop cars would set up camp waiting for the unsuspecting cars to come by. Regardless if the cars were speeding during the time of being pulled over, the “eye in the sky” knew it. So needless to say, I won’t be driving through Washington anytime soon.

Our hotel was in the state of Montana, because we were using the Montana entrance to the Park. During the off season, the majority of Yellowstone is closed off because of snow and plowing. But we were literally down the road from the entrance….down the road as in 65 miles or so.

The whole felt kind of strange without Andy there, but I will say it was nice not trying to figure out who was sleeping on the floor that night.

Whether she liked it or not, Emma and I were sleep budies for the remainder of the trip

Aramis

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Day 60 - Smells Like Teen Spirit

Well we woke up in Seattle the next morning and I was utterly shocked to open up the curtains and see the sun beaming right in my face with few clouds in the sky. Yeah, right. Like that would actually happen in Seattle. Of course when we woke up, it was downpour. It did lighten up when we hit the town.

Our first stop was the marketplace. For some reason we saw a ton of Asian bakeries, and lots of bakeries in general. We saw a lot of coffee shops, especially Starbucks. Why is this cool? You are probably are saying to yourself, “There is a Starbucks on nearly every street where I live”. Well in Seattle, you will find a Starbucks on literally almost every street. The global company started in Seattle, which meant that Emma and I were determined to get a coffee at the flagship coffee shop. We walked a second time through the market and saw a tourist behind the counter and she was having a whole fish tossed to her. I don’t know about her, but I certainly would not volunteer for that type of Seattle experience.

We grabbed lunch at a little place with a bunch of character. The menus for starts, were written on brown paper bags. Definitely from all the place we have eaten, that is the most unique form of menu. We had all been smiling to ourselves along the west coast when we read that restaurants have New England Clam Chowder. I was always nervous to try it outside of New England, especially along the west coast. Well I tried it and it tasted like….well, not a good clam chowder. Probably a 2 on a scale from 1-10.

After lunch we went to the Space Needle! I was the only one to actually go up to the observation deck. If you bought a ticket, you could stay up there for as long as you’d like and use all the interactive telescopes, touch screen information kiosks, and even grab a bite to eat at the restaurant. It was super windy outside, but I managed to get some pictures. I learned that the Space Needle was built to be the center piece of architecture for the World’s Fair that took place in Seattle. I eventually went back down and we headed back to the hotel.

We got pizza and went back to finish up the last season of Dexter.

Tomorrow we had a long drive to Yellowstone,

Aramis

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Day 59 - It's Not Being Green

All I knew about Portland, OR before going there was that there were a good amount of trees, it is kind of a young city, and there is a huge park there.

I later learned that the park in Portland is the largest urban park in the country…even bigger then Central Park in New York City. The first thing that we did was head to the park. We started walking around and shortly realized that once again, it was the off season. What I mean by this is that all the flowers in the Rose Garden were not there. There were a couple of flowers that were in bloom and very pretty. Even though it was disappointing not to see a lot of flowers, the fact that the park was the greenest I had ever seen made up for it. We walked around the park for a bit and found a trail and decided to just walk it, even though we didn’t know where it went. On the trail we were surrounded by trees and the environment seemed surreal.

Online we discovered that there is a bookstore worth visiting when you visit the city of Portland. I know, I know, this is very unlike me! Going to a bookstore to sightsee! Well I was skeptical at first but once walking into the front doors I could see why people put this on there things to do. It was a privately owned bookstore that consisted of the entire city block that it sat on. There were so many rooms to walk in and so many different types of books. I ended up going to there second location across the street to look at their math section. I hate to sound like a nerd but I resisted to only buying two math books. There were a lot more that I had never heard of that really grabbed by interest. This was definitely the coolest bookstore I had been to in a while. There was a lot of character in this bookstore that no Barnes and Noble could ever match up to.

Well the trip to Portland was only a day trip and we were off to Seattle, WA to see what all the fuss was about.

For some reason though, I was really hankering for some coffee.

Aramis

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Day 58 - This Land Is Your Land

Yosemite so far has been on of the best national parks. I wish we could have stayed there a little bit longer, but naturally the road was calling us.

Today was another travel day because we were driving all the way from Yosemite to the Portland, OR area. It was a long drive and we didn’t just drive straight there, we wanted to go visit the Redwood National Forest on our way up. Well were following the GPS to the forest and hoping to hop outside the car and walk around a bit to get a better feel of how big the trees were, but the GPS kind of brought us to this suburban area where a state parks HQ was. So I think that we must have missed the forest entrance. We ended up driving by many redwoods on the road and it was getting late so we ended up continuing on towards the hotel.

For the first time though, we stayed at a Holiday Inn. It was a THREE star hotel. Yeah, it was on the more expensive side to our spendings in terms of lodging but it was well worth it. The hotel was a couple of hours away from Portland. We figured we could just spend the night and resume our travels in the morning.

And that’s exactly what we did.

Aramis

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Day 57 - California Dreamin'

I could not believe it! We slept in until 10 am. Normally when we sleep in the tent we wake up around 7 or 8, so it was nice to get a couple extra hours of sleep.

Today was all about exploring the park. We wanted to go hiking and we picked a trail that was just a short drive from our campsite. We parked the car and headed towards the waterfall. There was a fantastic waterfall in the park that flowed down the humungous rock and there was a trail that eventually would lead you to a great view of it. We set off and immediately it was our hardest hike we had chosen to do. Really intense zig zagging up the rock. In order to get a good view of the waterfall we had to hike 1.5 miles up. I really enjoyed the fantastic views from way up and the waterfall was even cooler from the viewpoint.

After the hike Emma and I went to the gift shop and suddenly I was craving ice cream. So what do I do? I go to the little convenient store and get two chip-wiches. They were just what I needed after a 2.5 hour hike. By this time it was getting close to dinner and went back to the cafeteria did our typical camping thing later in the evening.

I wish tomorrow wasn’t our last day in the park.

Aramis

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Chicago!

We were up early on Thursday for the 12 hour drive to Chicago. Timmy's friend from Merrimack, Jill, is doing an Augustinian Volunteer program in Chicago (same program as his friend in San Diego). Friday, while Jill was at work, Timmy and I went to breakfast at a bakery down the street from her house before taking the train into downtown. It was a rainy/foggy day but we still managed to get in a bunch of sightseeing: the big bean, the Marilyn Monroe statue, Michigan Ave, the flagship UNO, and the river. We headed back to Jill's just in time to go with her to the airport to pick up another Merrimack friend, Sam. The four of us went to dinner and then headed to a few bars near Jill's house.

Saturday we got our 3rd oil change (and they washed the car!) then met up with Jill and Sam downtown to go to Wrigleyville to see the Cubs stadium. We went back to Jill's for a bit then back downtown to go to Howl at the Moon (piano bar) for the night. Very fun.

really liked Chicago, very big, but definitely a cool place to visit!

Sunday we left in the late morning to get to Cleveland....

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