Day One - On the road

Wednesday August 10th
All's well that ends well. Sitting and relaxing here in my tent everything seems OK now. I wasn't sure that it was going to work out that way over the course of the day though. I always forget when I plan how many miles I'm going to ride in a day to account for the average speed through a given area. It is almost always slower going when you are riding through, say, a national park. That is doubly so when you are riding through Yellowstone National Park.

I was originally hoping to make it to the Mammoth Hot Springs campground by mid afternoon. It was about 3PM when I reached the south entrance of Yellowstone, so I figured that I was roughly on schedule. I had less than 90 miles to ride through the park and the sign at the South entrance noted that there were still spots available in Mammoth Hot Springs. By the time that I had actually reached the campground 3 and a half hours later that was no longer the case.

I really had my heart set on camping but had resigned to get a hotel room for the night somewhere north of the park. The thought of a hotel room was all the more enticing considering that I was still a little wet and cold from riding in the rain earlier in the day and that the weather looked like it might be unpleasant overnight. I thought that I was lucky when I exited through the North entrance of the park and noticed that a number of hotel rooms had vacancies.

The first spot that I stopped at wanted $80 for a dingy motel room. I just couldn't bring myself to pay that. I had paid more than that for hotel rooms in the past but I'm going to be on the road for the next 18 days. If I break down and pay $80 for a hotel every time that I have a tough time finding a campground then I'll be broke by the end of the trip. So, I decided to push on and look for either another campground outside of the park or for a cheaper hotel room a little farther north.

Luckily, I stumbled onto an RV park just a couple of miles outside of the park that had a tent site available for the low, low price of $25 including a hot shower in the morning. Even better than the price was the location. The tent sites sat overlooking the Yellowstone river. It was a good thing that I got settled in when I did. As I sit writing this now in my tent, the wind and rain are blowing so hard that I fear that the tent will not survive the night. I was hoping to be lulled to sleep by the sound of water running in the background. Unfortunately the only water that I can hear right now is the sound of the rain pummeling the tent.

It won't be the first rain that I've had to survive through today. In fact, the rain has pretty much been threatening ever since I left Utah this morning. Utah bade me farewell by painting it's skies black with thunderclouds. Fortunately, she was nice enough not to actually rain on me. That honor was bestowed upon the state of Wyoming. The rain started just as I was leaving Jackson Wyoming and heading into Teton National Park. Fortunately I thought ahead to put on my rain gear. I rode about 50 miles in pouring rain, thunder and lightning before it finally subsided just before entering Yellowstone.

All in all, it's been a pretty good day. I rode 500 miles through 4 different states (Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, Montana) and got to see some pretty beautiful country. The weather could have been nicer and I am a little pissed off that I have managed once again to ride through Yellowstone without actually doing anything IN Yellowstone but, hey, I guess you can't win 'em all. By the way, the rain has stopped now and I can hear the sound of the river again. Good night.