The Dixons in Yellowstone

Uncle Nigel and his family invited us to come down to Yellowstone with them just after school ended, and gave up their condo so we could stay in it. The trip was super sweet, thanks to them!

Every night, Jared would serenade us with the ukelele.

On our way down there, we stopped in Montana to get a two-hour tour of the Lewis-and -Clark caves. They were really cool, and Colin was super psyched about them. Maybe too excited - there were many near misses in which he could've broken something. But, we got through it. (Side note: if you think there are too many pictures of Colin, there are. For two reasons: he generally does something of low intelligence that is perceived as cute, and the sites we visited could kill a kid in many ways, so we had to concentrate our efforts on him).

There was a tiny column of bats on the ceiling of the first room we went into, so the guide told us to be very quiet. This aroused some concern for little Colin, but he was actually not that noisy. I think he was sort of intimidated at first, but as you can see, he warmed up to it quickly.
The first picture here is a picture of the whole gang, getting ready to go into the caves, getting our last glimpses of the daylight. For two hours, anyways. The second picture is Colin and Jared in the last room, called the Paradise Room. It's super big, and has some really amazing stalactites and stalacmites that we didn't take any pictures of. Oops. The bottom picture is me (Miriam) and Colin in one of the most cramped parts. Those were the tough parts, because he felt like breaking a couple of those fragile stalactites.
Half way through the tour, the guide turned off all of the lights, and we were in total darkness. It was pretty freaky, especially being hundreds of feet below the ground. The tour really was amazing. We would highly recommend it to anyone traveling in this vicinity.

This here is an example of how the little boys liked to observe the features in Yellowstone. This particular item of interest is a bacterial mat. They weren't actually boiling, so there were many attempted swipes at the mat. Luckily, none succeeded. (Left to right: Paul, Evan, Colin).

More pictures of our little guy. He was a good sport about all the hiking, but he quickly tired of both walking and geysers. He and the geysers also had somewhat of a love-hate relationship. He was awestruck by the thousands of gallons of water shooting upwards, but he was also terrified. At one point, he told me, "I don' want to see any more big geysers. Jus' li'l ones that go, plop."

This is me and Caroline. Sisters in front of a lake. This lake was the biggest boiling pool, I think. It was probably really pretty, but we couldn't tell, because there was a bunch of stinky steam being blown our way. So, I'm trusting all those gorgeous pictures from above that you see in brochures and National Geographic.

This is Grand Geyser erupting. We were super lucky to catch it as we walked by. Usually you have to wait an hour or two to see it. Anyways, it's the world's tallest predictable geyser, and it shot up about two-hundred feet. There was a guy there - not a ranger - that was really obsessive about geysers. He was pretty informative, and told us stories about how some geysers erupted so explosively that they blew themselves apart. This was a really awesome geyser to see, but it was also the one that made Colin screech bloody murder.

Paul and Ben were forced to resort to meditation when there was nothing else to do. The other tourists were pretty good about it. There were like, three tour buses full of Asians that were really funny to watch. 

This trip really was a blast. We are so grateful to the Nigel Campbells for making it happen. Colin and I were having an interesting conversation the other day. When I mentioned that there would be other tourists visiting Yellowstone, he got really mad. He said, "They will visit my Yellowstone? When they go home, I will smash them all."

So, you could say he feels strongly about it. We had a great time, though. 

Signing off,

Miriam