Trip report: MI to Montana and Yellowstone, Pt. 2
After seeing Devil’s Tower we drove up to visit my sister in Montana. We stopped at Custer’s Trading Center, had a good lunch there and looked around the store. My sister & b.i.l. live in Darby which is a really great town. Made famous on the Tonight Show because the local Marshall pulled over Dave Letterman and wasn’t pleasant about it. I get the impression the Marshall isn’t pleasant to anyone. We also did day trips to other really cool towns, Phillipsburg, which has a huge candy store. To get there from Darby we drove over the Skalkaho Pass and got to see a really beautiful waterfall. We also stopped at a place to “mine” for sapphires. It’s the usual buy a bucket of dirt/rocks and sift through it, but we had fun. We also went to a market in Hamilton and a great French restaurant called A Taste of Paris. All of those towns had fun shops and restaurants, but I thought Darby was the most scenic.
After our visit in Montana we headed down to Yellowstone. There were two cool towns on the way down (by the north entrance), Nevada City and Virginia City. Both were very scenic, had historic buildings to see and there was a train you could ride between them. Yellowstone was amazing! We stayed at The Old Faithful Inn, which wouldn’t have been possible without the great advice here at Intercot (NJGirl, I think you’re the one who gave me the heads up?). It was really beautiful and, as advised, we made sure we got a room in the “new” wing so that we had a bathroom in our room. We did notice that some of the other rooms in our hallway were a little larger than ours with a table and two chairs in them. It would be worth it to request one of those on a future trip.
As expected, we weren’t able to fit everything in we would have liked to while in Yellowstone. We didn’t appreciate the scope of the loops and how long it would take to check things out. We were able to hit pretty much everything on the west side of the south loop, all of the geyser basins, Gibbon Falls and the paintpots. We made it up to Mammoth Hot Springs to see the terraces. We were totally surprised by the fact that there were little towns at Mammoth and the Canyon! Places to eat, shops, visitor centers. We knew those things were there, we just didn’t expect them to be so extensive. We did the hike down into the Yellowstone River Canyon. The view of the falls there was one of my favorites! Although there were about 9 million steps, it was worth it.
We did book a dinner at Old Faithful Inn when we booked our room (over a year in advance!). Dinner was very good, not fabulous, fairly pricey, beautiful setting. I wouldn’t consider this a must-do in the future, although it was nice to eat dinner there. We were able to eat breakfast there every morning. They had a good buffet, or you could order from the menu. When we ordered from the menu it took a pretty long time to get our food. After a couple of mornings waiting, we opted to go with the buffet after that. It was more expensive but much quicker.
We saw elk, a pine martin, ravens and bison. People were getting waaayyy too close to the bison! Didn’t see any moose or bears unfortunately. We did hear a coyote one night. The last couple days we were there we had a really fun surprise. The hotels were decorating for Christmas and the staff were wishing everyone a Merry Christmas! We got a picture of the girls in front of the tree at the Inn. And we loved walking out to watch Old Faithful go off!
