An Introduction to Yellowstone

So I’m sitting here staring at a blank page and thinking “How the heck am I going to fit all of this into my blog?!” I just got back from this HUGE vacation in Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons. I seriously paaaaacked this trip. We didn’t stop from sunrise to sunset every day we were there. I want to give y’all the most information possible to get the best trip but I also don’t want to overwhelm you or make the story boring with a bunch of facts. THUS why I’m staring at a blank page.

OK! I’ve decided. I’m going to give you step by step of this trip. I know it’s a lot but I’m going to break it up into 3 posts so it’s not too much at one time.  I’m a biiiiit anal when it comes to planning my big trips so I do have everything typed up into a shorter itinerary. If you would like a copy shoot me an email.

Over the course of several months I read multiple books, blogs, and websites to find the best things to do in the limited amount of time we had. I want to give a BIG thanks to Lonely Planet. Their book was so super helpful in planning this trip. Seriously one of the best vacations I’ve had.

Now Chris and I don’t have kids and are relatively young, as was the other couple we traveled with. So we did A LOT of hiking. We also stayed in one room and split the cost to make this a more affordable vacation.

We flew into Salt Lake City Airport and drove to Yellowstone. If you aren’t on a tight budget I recommend flying into Jackson. It’s about a 7 hour drive from SLC once you factor in breaks along the way. In order to save a bit of time and money we stopped at Walmart and got groceries for most of our breakfasts and lunches. None of the hotels inside Yellowstone have refrigerators, so we got a cheap Styrofoam cooler and used Ziplocs to keep ice in. This kept the food from sitting in water once the ice melted. It worked pretty well. We did dinners at the hotel restaurants because by the end of the night everyone was ready for something besides sandwiches and bars lol.

Now I should warn you there are no TVs, no free internet, and no air conditioners in the hotel rooms inside the park. For you younger generations this might be a little tuff 😉 I personally loved that we all had to interact with each other and had no distractions from the beauty of the country we were in.

Because you are in a mountainous region the evenings and mornings are quite a bit cooler than mid-day, so wear layers. We did a hike every morning while it was nice and cool. I think I lost like 5 lbs in a week lol. It was amazing and totally worth the early rise.

At this point I’m going to pause my description of the trip. The next couple of posts will have a day by day run of what we did or tried to do lol. We weren’t quite able to fit everything in that I had originally planned.

I hope this post gave you some good pointers and useful information. Stay tuned for more ideas and don’t forget to follow me 🙂