Since I've been lazy and am writing this part of the story several months after the trip, I'll probably leave out some details. However, you'll still get the general idea.
Sunday May 31 was our first day of our road trip. The general plan: Beartooth Highway, Yellowstone, western Montana, Glacier National Park, and home. We left out of Worland around 9:30 am and headed to Cody. We had an early lunch at a cafe there, then headed north to Red Lodge, MT. That's one of the ends of the Beartooth Highway. What a beautiful drive! It was also interesting to note that because of the time of year, not all of the snow had melted. In fact, the entire highway had only been open for about one or two weeks - the machinery had just recently cut down through the snow to the road. It was interesting to see how deep some of the snow was - the machinery had cut down through as much as 20 or more feet of snow to get to the road! The other interesting thing: the temperatures. It was warm (almost hot) down at the lower altitudes, but getting into the higher country, the temps really started cooling off. At the top - Beartooth Pass - the temperature was barely above freezing! By the way, an interesting fact: the elevation at Beartooth Pass is just shy of 11,000 feet. Pretty cool to be that high and still be on solid ground.
One of the major activities during the entire road trip was taking a lot of photos. I needed to put some pictures on some of the bare walls in my house, so I thought, "Why not put up some of your own pictures?" Needless to say, I took a TON of pictures. Most were not wall-worthy, but there are a few in there that definitely are. I didn't have a special camera setup or anything fancy. In fact, all of the pics I took were taken with my little Canon PowerShot SD1100 IS point-and-shoot. This is the same camera I had in Italy the previous year. It takes great pictures for a point-and-shoot, and it is nice and compact. The obvious downside is that it isn't as capable as an SLR or similar camera, and the zoom range on it is limited. But it does pretty well with wide and close-up shots.
Anyway, day one consisted of the drive from Cody to Red Lodge and then down the Beartooth Highway to where it intersects with the Chief Joseph Scenic Highway on its way to Cooke City, MT. That, in turn, leads to the northeast entrance to Yellowstone National Park. Upon entering Yellowstone, we took the northern route around the park to the west, then turned to exit the park at the west entrance. This is one of the more beautiful parts of the park. You don't see the thermal attractions you see on the southwestern side, but there are lots of beautiful mountain vistas and prairies. This is also one of the best areas of the park to see lots of wildlife, especially buffalo and elk.
The west entrance to the park is just east of West Yellowstone, MT. Here we turned north and headed to Bozeman, MT for our first overnight stay. Here we stayed at a Hampton Inn, and had a late supper at Famous Dave's B-BQ. I'd never eaten at one before, and I have to say, they've got some pretty darned good B-BQ. Oh, and of course, we washed it all down with some Moose Drool.
Here are a few pics from day one of the road trip.
