Knowing Is Half the Battle – Our Wyoming Adventure, Part One
Two years ago, the girls and I vacationed in California and Arizona for a week. We called it the Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Tour, since we saw the largest of each: whales off the coast of San Francisco, redwoods and sequoias in California, and the Grand Canyon in Arizona. (Technically, the Grand Canyon is an absence of minerals, but whatever.) It was quite possibly the best week of my life, and our week out West provided so many memories we continue to cherish.
I’m determined to see the world with the girls while they’re young. We may never have another Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Tour, but there are plenty of amazing places we have to explore. I’m thinking the 2018 Winter Olympics in Korea would be a blast. We’ll work up to that by seeing more of our own beautiful country.
This summer, we set our sights on the great state of Wyoming. Actually, I investigated places to see in both Wyoming and Montana, but, as much as I wanted to visit Glacier National Park in northern Montana, I couldn’t figure out a Wyoming-Montana road trip that fit within the eight days we would have for vacation, so we focused on Wyoming. (Montana, we’ll come see you some other time.) And I couldn’t come up with a catchy name for our trip (which meant no logo, like we had last time), but never mind: Wyoming would be a blast.
There’s plenty to do in Wyoming, with the Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks at the top of the list. I picked up a travel guide from the bookstore, read through it every chance I got (mostly while on flights to and from various gigs this spring), and came up with a list of natural wonders, cowboy culture, and kid-friendly attractions all over Wyoming. The hardest part? Finding a decent map of Wyoming I could print out and mark up with travel plans. Should have bought an atlas.
Once I had a rough route planned out, with some advice on driving distances from Google Maps, I started looking at flights. Most of my points were with Southwest, which doesn’t fly to Wyoming, so I had to choose between Salt Lake City (closer to the national parks in Wyoming, but pricier) and Denver (more of a drive, but cheap). Denver won. I figured I needed to cut costs wherever I could on this trip. That gave me a plan: Fly into Denver on Sunday, July 5th, pick up my rental car, then drive around Wyoming for a week, flying home from Denver on the 12th.
Next step: Book hotels (not campsites — I’m not crazy) and key reservations, like a breakfast cruise on a lake in the Grand Teton National Park and horseback riding with the girls in Cody, Wyoming. Pro tip: Hotels that are actually in the national parks book fast, so get those reservations in early. I was able to snag one for Grand Teton, but our Yellowstone hotel was in West Yellowstone, just outside the park. (Bonus: West Yellowstone is actually in Montana, so we did get to see a bit of the Treasure State.)
Flights, rental car, hotels, activity reservations, all in good shape. That meant I could work on supplies. The girls’ cameras were in bad shape — Hannah had my old point-and-shoot with a busted LCD and Lily had the indestructible pink camera she got when she was a toddler, which took photos like a cell phone from 2002. We needed to upgrade, so I did some research (thanks, photography magazines!) and ordered some cameras.
Lily got another indestructible camera (well, waterproof, dustproof, and drop-proof from seven feet), but one intended for the Go Pro set, so it took excellent pictures. I saw Lily drop the camera twice on the first two days of the trip, so I chose wisely. Hannah’s new camera wasn’t quite so tough, but it had what we ended up calling the Mega Zoom. She had significantly more magnifying power than even my DSLR, with its (admittedly, pretty cheap) telephoto lens. Plus, Hannah’s camera had manual settings, so I could use it teach her about things like aperture and shutter speed.
We wouldn’t go a week in Wyoming without doing some hiking, so we headed to our local outfitters and outfitted ourselves. All-weather shirts, pants that convert to shorts (Lily thought this was the coolest thing ever), and new hiking shoes. Actually, we ran into some problems here. Our local outfitters didn’t have shoes in Lily’s exact size, and their jacket selection for eleven-year-olds was limited, so I ordered a pair of shoes and a windbreaker from their online store. I swear the checkout process said that both items would arrive Friday before our trip. I swear. That did not happen, however, so we had to do some shopping in Wyoming. More than once while there I mentioned out loud the fine hiking shoes I had ordered for Lily sitting on my front steps back home. Grr.
Aside from shipping delays, the trip prep went well. I showed the girls a few photos from my travel guide to get them excited. All they cared about was the possibility of wildlife sightings, which was fine with me — I didn’t want to share too much about the sights of Wyoming with the girls, since I wanted to have some surprises for them along the way. And I learned two years ago that the girls would be happy traveling as long as they encountered animals each day. Wyoming would certainly deliver on that front!
I was excited about the trip — and far less nervous than two years ago, heading to San Francisco. Being the only responsible adult in the party worried me a little, but the girls were older now (ages 7 and 11, instead of 5 and 9) and I had the AVM experience to bolster my confidence. You may recall our whale watching trip from that vacation, one of those whatever-doesn’t-kill-you experiences.
Plus, Hannah has a cell phone now, so if we got separated, all would not be lost. That reminds me of one of the new challenges this time around: Electronics. Every night at the hotel, I spent half an hour downloading photos from all three cameras to my laptop (as a backup), then making sure that three cameras, two cell phones, one laptop, and two tablets were charged for the next day. I was tempted to ditch the tablets before we left (“Look out the window, kids! Nature!”), but I’m glad I didn’t. We ended up having enough driving time that the girls needed some entertainment.
All in all, prep for the trip went smoothly. Don’t get me wrong — it was a ton of work. But going into July 5th, I felt pretty confident that I had a good plan. We were up pretty late the night before packing, but we made our flight to Denver the next morning. And I only forgot a hat, a pair of jeans, and Lily’s booster. Not bad!
As with the AVM Tour, expect a series of posts here on the blog about the Wyoming trip. If I don’t blog it, I’ll forget it. And just maybe someone else will enjoy reading about our adventures. I’ll try to fit in some dad reflections along the way, so it’s not just buffalo and geysers. But there were some pretty awesome buffalo and geysers!