Last weekend, Sam and I were able to go out to Island Park for his dad’s side of the family, family reunion. We were able to get up early and head out to Yellowstone National Park first thing. We were able to watch a bear at the Grizzly and Wolf Discovery Center tear apart a cooler for an hour. They test coolers out there so companies can put a sticker on their coolers that say they’re bear resistant. It was pretty cool.
After watching the bear unsuccessfully get into the cooler, we made our way into the park. We were able to see Old Faithful and a lot of the stops leading up to Old Faithful. Yellowstone is beautiful in its own right, and I recommend everyone get out there at least once. We were only able to get out to Old Faithful and then had to turn around so we could make it out to his aunt’s property back in Island Park for dinner when everyone planned on being there.
I didn’t take very many pictures while we were in Yellowstone because I was really enjoying being in the present and spending time with Sam while he was clear headed. The last time we went out to Yellowstone before his family’s reunion, we were in the middle of figuring out his POTS diagnosis and didn’t really know how to mitigate symptoms while traveling, or really at all. This time was different because we know how to do those things now and spending time in God’s creation with my husband was one of my favorite things.
Sam took some pictures on my phone while we were in the park. The second picture above is one of his. It’s one of my favorite pictures of a bacteria mat in the park near one of the thermal pools. It’s dangerous, hot, and will melt flesh, but so beautiful.
The family reunion was a lot of fun and Sam was able to enjoy it this year. My anxiety levels were almost non existent this year so I was also able to enjoy his extended family better this year than the last time we went. I’ve made some lifestyle choices recently, for health reasons, and I’m already seeing the effects of some of those changes, like the anxiety being non existent.
In one of my posts a few weeks ago, I talked about how Sam and I are people who don’t really stop on road trips. Or at least we didn’t use to. We did this time on the way home. We took the slightly longer way home through Driggs and Victor so we could drive along the Tetons because Grand Tetons National Park was going to be quite the drive on the way home. We were able to drive through the Palisades and stop at Palisades reservoir for a few minutes to enjoy the scenery.
We hadn’t ever been through the Palisades, but it’s definitely a place we want to go back to and visit and spend time in. We drove up and over mountains through this journey and saw some of the most beautiful scenery we’ve ever seen. I was a little nervous through some of this drive because sometimes those mountain roads didn’t have guardrails and it was hard to tell how far into the forest it was flat before it dropped into a cliff. And sometimes there was just a few feet before there was a cliff and still no guardrail.
We were able to go through Garden City and see Bear Lake on our way home, a place Sam had never been to. So as we were driving around the lake looking for a place to stop, he was able to admire the lake and how blue it is this time of year. Another place we’re going to go back to and spend time in.
And then somewhere in Garden City we missed the turn to get on the highway to go through Logan Canyon and get us home. We didn’t realize it until we were almost a half an hour farther away than we needed to be. The GPS said the way we were taking was going to be faster than if we turned around at that point. So we took the road we had never been on before. It was another mountain road and a lot of the signs were for cities in western Wyoming near the Utah/Wyoming border. Sam and I both laughed and continued to enjoy the scenery.
A couple of months ago, this detour we took would have stressed me out and I would have freaked out a little. Even though we were going to get home at the same time we were going to get home even if we had gotten onto the highway at the correct turn. But because of the lifestyle changes I’ve started to make, I was able to enjoy the scenery and the drive. There was almost no one on the road with us and there was some farm land once we had made it over the mountain. I knew almost exactly where we were once we had come out the other side and knew about where we were going to come out on the main roads to make it home. We made it home before dark and had a great time while doing it.
This is only the second time Sam and I have made it a point to stop along the way and the first time we had to take a detour completely out of the way in order to make it to where we were going. But we had such a good time doing it and we got to see places and scenery we would have normally skipped over or not seen at all. And there are places we want to go back and visit and spend time in and explore. That’s the great thing about taking the road less traveled, as in the Robert Frost poem. When people don’t normally take the detour, the people who do get to enjoy it so much more. So if you’re traveling, take the road, take the detour, see the sights, take your time. You never know what you’ll see or what you’ll run into.