Yellowstone!

Prologue

As a child, hardly an amenable weekend went by without my father taking me camping around Arizona. During longer breaks from school we'd travel father afield and there aren't any western states that we didn't camp in. While I enjoyed both the experience and the opportunity immensely, these memories of childhood are haphazard memories, ungrounded in geography. Vivid memories of places I had visited are virtually impossible to identify with names, and places I knew I had been to are no more than names on a map, waiting to be rediscovered in adulthood

In the summer of 1999 my new in-laws from Taiwan decided to come for a visit and a family vacation.

Our first prospective vacation spot was Banff National Park in Canda. Being newly married, my wife, Chu-Wan, was going through the lengthy immigrations and naturalizations procedures here in the US. Consequently, she was not eligible to leave the US without potentially abandoning her visa application. Rather than risk that, we settled upon a US destination: Yellowstone National Park - the grandaddy of all national parks in the world.

With a destination in mind I, Chu-Wan (my wife), Mr. & Mrs. Huang (her parents), Johnny (her brother), Tiffany (Johnny's girlfriend) and Kiki (family friend's daughter) set out on our trip.

Day Zero - Thursday, August 19, 1999

From the air, the swath of destruction stood out against the ordered grid of Salt Lake City like a huge gaping wound ripped from the flesh of the city. Seen from the air, the magnitude of the destruction was humbling. That's how I wanted to start this travelogue, with an evocative description of the damage of the tornado that ripped through last week, instead I saw nothing of the damage.

What I did see from the air, however, was the Great Salt Lake itself. Our flight path brought us over the lake and then looped back before our approach into the airport. The lake itself was comprised of dead, sickly-colored water, with strange flowing patterns of minerals clearly visible from the sky. At the edge of the lake, we crossed a great alkalai flat, and then, oddly, the pools of water took on an appearance of algae mats covering the surface of the water. This gave way to swampy ground and then suddenly the airport. In fact, so near the "swamp" was the airport that it appeared we were going to land in it, but at the last second solid ground appeared below us and then the tarmac.

We arrived at about 2:00PM, almost on time despite a boarding delay due to a tire replacement, and then a further delay on the runway because the previous arriving flight on the same runway had blown a chunk out of their tire. The pilot assured us it was a common experience to loss parts of the plane when landing on hot runways like Phoenix's. There was turbulence both leaving Phoenix and arriving in Salt Lake City, but the biggest shock was when we discovered that our flight to Pocatello - Idaho's second largest city - was on a two engine prop driven plane. Never having been on a prop driven plane, I didn't know what to expect. My mother-in-law was looking rather green and I later discovered she doesn't enjoy flying (or anything involving heights) at all. She got a lot greener when we were in flight! The flight was OK most of the time, although the engines were noisy enough to prevent conversation during the flight. As we started descending into Pocatello, it became a roller coaster ride. It wasn't a good thing, Chu-Wan was crushing my hand and I could see that Tiffany was also not enjoying the flight at all.

Nonetheless, we arrived safely at gate 4 of the Pocatello airport. Gate 4 is rather comically named, as there appear to be no other gates, despite signs to the contrary. We picked up our luggage (they did have an electronic luggage conveyor) and checked out our rental car: A Dodge Caravan. Once our luggage was loaded on board we set off towards Pocatello. The van was nice, but the first 10 miles were spent while each member of the crew took turns whining from the back (in Chinese) to turn on the air conditioning in the back. It was a desceptively long drive into the thriving metropolis of Pocatello.

By now, I was starving for lunch, but not so the rest of the family. Nobody was willing to let me stop for pizza, so I stopped in at Dairy Queen and had a chicken sandwich while they went to the nearby grocery store and shopped for supplies.

After stocking up with enough groceries to last through winter, we headed north for the very long drive to West Yellowstone, Montana. For the most part, the drive is unmemorable, but we did pass the turn off for the Craters of the Moon monument.

Craters of the Moon is one of the few places that I can vividely remember from childhood and I was eager to see if my memory was playing tricks on me, but we didn't have time to detour to it. Even without the detour it was 8PM when we arrived in West Yellowstone and checked into a nice little hotel called the 3 Bears lodge. Because all of us were going to stay in one hotel room, Chu-Wan booked a special suite. It was a two-room hotel suite with one bathroom, but two separate sink areas, a refrigerator and a microwave. One room contained two queen-sized beds, the other contained a king size bed. We had decided that my in-laws would share the room with the two queen size beds, while we would be taking the seperate bedroom with the king-sized bed.

When we arrived we were somewhat shocked to find that the king bed was in the open area with the bathroom and the main door while the two queen beds were in the private room. We had a most unsatisfactory dinner in town that night and turned in for the evening.

As everyone was going to bed, Johnny went on one of his "errands" for Tiffany. This time to find her some milk. We had to give him a key and hope he wouldn't disturb us when he returned. He returned several hours later, smelling suspiciously like a bar and without milk. It was hardly suprising that he couldn't find milk, since he didn't leave until after 10pm and there are apparently no convenience stores in West Yellowstone.

About 2:30AM, I was awoken by the sound of someone trying to open a door - without success. My first waking thought was that someone was trying to break in to the room. Instead, I discovered Chu-Wan's father trying to get into the bathroom. Apparently when Johnny came home, he took a quick shower to disguise the evidence and managed to lock the bathroom door on his way out. 10 minutes with a bobby pin and I was able to open the door. Not an auspsious first night in West Yellowstone.