Day 10 - Yellowstone or Bust !

Last night I had to watch one of my favorite shows "Dancing with the Stars" so we finally turned on the television; however, what I failed to take into account was the fact that the ABC station it was on was on Mountain Time.  The show didn't start until 9:00 pm.  I did watch it and we were up at 6:30 am and on the road by 7:45.  What a great time to be headed east...sunrise.

We drove around the south end of the park on US 2.  There pictures were taken from that road.  At Browning we got on US 89 to I-15S.  We stopped at a truck stop for sandwiches, chips, and drinks and headed for a rest area about 40 miles down the road.  The interstate passed through a gorgeous (the word beautiful is being over used so I thought I would try another word) canyon and there was an scenic overlook so we stopped to look and ended up eating there.   Sunday we had trumpet music as we ate and today we had gorgeous scenery.  

We exited the interstate at Helena onto US 287.  The scenery changed to low rolling hills which are covered with hay and wheat fields.  The closer we got to Yellowstone, the scenery changed again to tall mountains and rushing, rocky rivers.  

This part of Montana has a lot of huge ranches with names like Odell Creek Ranch, Garden Valley Ranch, Carroll Ranch, Eld Meadows Ranch, and my favorite, Grangers Pastures.  We had some road construction which slowed us down.  We drove 475 miles in 10 hours.  The going is slow when you have to drive 35 MPH through several miles of construction.  One thing I noticed as we were driving through the little towns is that a lot of them have very new, modern-looking post offices.  Too bad the post office doesn't have the money to replace some of Central Illinois' old post offices.  I guess you have to live west of the Mississippi River to get a new post office.

This picture is a leftover from yesterday.  Part of the drive was through a Blackfeet Indian Reservation.
Besides the sign, there was a metal sculpture representing Blackfeet.

We got at the Grizzley RV Campground around 5:30.  We are camped in site 204.  It is not a KOA because a fellow camper at Glacier had told us that the KOA wasn't very nice so I went on line and found this one.  It is nice with grass and trees but, of course, it doesn't compare to the one in Glacier so don't expect to see pictures of this one.  One good thing about is that it is only 2 miles from the west entrance of Yellowstone and we can walk to downtown West Yellowstone if we want.  We saw some neat roadside signs about earthquakes as we drove close to this park that I think we will check out before we leave the area.  More on that in a later blog.

It is getting late so I'm going to post some more pictures and then call it a night.  It is raining for the first time on this trip.  It can rain all night but we want it to stop by morning!  They have freeze warnings here.  We got a slip of paper that said we should unhook our water connection at night to avoid freezing.  It is a $50 fee is we don't and faucet freezes.  Needless to say, we are going to unhook the water.

An early morning view of the road as we left West Glacier.

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