Yellowstone

Whiskey Myers - Stone (Audio)

July 31 – August 7, 2021

After our adventures in South Dakota, we said goodbye to the Meiers and our new adopted home state and pointed Big Blue Truck west, with a destination of the world’s first national park. Or as our artist of the post, Whiskey Myers, (no relation to Dan and Susan, I don’t think) might put it, we “turned to ‘Stone”.

It’s hard to find music about Yellowstone without pulling up a bunch of information about the show of the same name. Even the song above is now associated with it. I understand it is very popular, but I’ve never watched it. Based on YouTube clips and descriptions that accompany the music, it seems to be about Kevin Costner’s very rich family who owns a whole bunch of land and likes to either dress fancy or cosplay as cowboys. They fly around in their helicopter as they struggle with wealthy landowner problems like the government and poor people. For some reason Yellowstone has very strong Paramount branding (other shows don’t seem to do this), but isn’t actually available to stream on Paramount+. Weird.

We had a couple of longer drive days, and stopped for a single night at an RV park along the way. The park was fairly unremarkable, but was within easy walking distance of a solid local fast food restaurant. Izzy tried some real fried chicken for the first time and was excited to inform her Lola that she now eats “chicken on the bone”.

We stopped at a couple of interesting rest areas along the way. The first had what appeared to be a family reunion going on. There was a playground and a few covered picnic areas, but it wasn’t that nice. There must be a serious lack of parks in the area.

We also stopped at a rest area that abutted the Museum of Flight and Aerial Firefighting. The museum was closed, but we got to check out some of the planes through the fence.

After a scenic drive the second day, we arrived at Mountain View Resort & RV. I think this park is newly setup to host RVs and the site layout is a little odd. We ended up with a pull-in/back-out site, but there was enough room for our truck to pull all the way through. Once settled, it was a fine place to park and provided us with some great views.

Of course, our objective for the week was to explore Yellowstone, which is massive. We had about a 30 minute drive to get to the east entrance station and then another 40 minutes just to get to the main loop road that circles the park. We ended up spending a lot of time in the truck. On the days we headed out, we would pack a picnic lunch, leave as early as possible, and then head back in the late afternoon. We managed to see quite a bit of the park, but sadly not as many big animals as we would have liked. We learned a lot thanks to the Just Ahead app, which would chime in and give us the history of sites as we approached them. I’d highly recommend it or something similar when exploring the larger national parks.

From here, I’ll just let the photos to the talking, plugging in some captions where I can.

That was our adventure in Yellowstone. Join us next time as we head south to visit the majestic Grand Tetons. See you down the road!