Bison!

Three months before our wedding day, Ed and I drove halfway across the country together. We knew that if we spend 1500 miles together in a car without killing each other, then we just might be able to make our marriage work.

And so we drove through Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota, and to the western side of Wyoming, stopping at all the tourist spots, until we finally arrived at our final destination: Yellowstone National Park.

Our first impression of Yellowstone was that Yellowstone is BIG. There is no way to see Yellowstone in just one day. Everything about Yellowstone is BIG; the geysers, the waterfalls, the canyons, and the bison. Bison are HUGE. And a little big scary.

We were staying in the park for six days. The very first morning we looked out our cabin window and saw a bison. A big bison. A bison so large that I didn’t want to leave our cabin.

Top o’ the mornin’ to you

It didn’t help that we were given this flier in our park information.

As we were walking along a bridge one day, we noticed a bison behind us. As the bison approached the bridge, he started speeding up. I got a little nervous, and so I started speeding up. Ed claims he wasn’t as nervous as I was, but I did notice that he kept up with me. The bison started running across the bridge. Ed and I starting running across the bridge. All I wanted to do was get back into the car, although if the bison decided to tackle it, the car would have been totaled.

As we got back to our car, the bison crossed the bridge and slowed down, climbing up the grassy hill by the side of the road. He was just as nervous about crossing that bridge as I was of him!

As you can already predict, neither one of us was gored by a bison.

And we lived happily ever after. So far, anyway.

Mama's Losin' It

Written in response to the following prompt for Mama Kat’s Writer’s Workshop: A vacation to remember.

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Rewind to Summer: The Open Road

Road Trip! Do those words send a thrill up your spine? Picture an open highway in front of you, miles traveled behind you, and an exciting destination just ahead. Places to go! People to see! Memories to be made!
Following the wagon trails made by pioneers out west…the trails have been made into concrete super highways, but the adventure still remains! Skies of endless blue, miles and miles of endless land stretching out ahead of you….
Staring out at the open plains is only fun for so long. How did those pioneers not go stark raving mad, especially in the middle of Nebraska?
Wait! What’s that on the side of the highway? Do you see what I see?
It’s a tractor parade!

This pink tractor gets my vote for Best in Show.

Smack dab in the middle of the Great Platte River Plains is an archway museum. Jack Nicholson’s character stops here in the movie About Schmidt, but we kept on driving.

During our travels, we saw many of these wind farms. A new way to harness energy, the turbines twirl slowly in the wind. What do you think about these miles and miles of wind turbines? Cool…or creepy?

Coffee is a traveler’s best friend…

With temperatures dipping way below freezing, wind chills, and icy sidewalks, and the new year quickly approaching, it seems like a good time to remember what we did during our vacation in the summer of 2010. I snapped these photos when I was riding in the car on our trip from Illinois to Colorado and back again. This was a prompt from:

Mama's Losin' It