April Come She Will: Ye Olde Yellowstone

Image from:https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/8e/ae/bb/8eaebbacf6f18ab0888013a7498f4826.jpg

I learned a few things on our recent trip to Yellowstone:

Finn... he likes fire. Like. Realllly likes it. "Pour more gasoline on the fire mom!" as we stare at a fully lit fire in a forest. Uhmmm, that's a negative son.

Also, his marshmallow roasting skills are on point. Only one marshmallow was sacrificed to the (surely grateful) marshmallow gods...

Unplugging and being away from technology is overwhelmingly easy. At first there's a little panic involved, but then sooo much goodness. I also thought Finn would get bored and start to ask what else there was to do, but he really acclimated to the environment and was able to chill out and relax as well. We played the imaginative games we usually play at home, but now we set them in a forest environment. Life changing. Batman vs King Kong will never be the same...

It's an incredible rush to experience pretty much every type of biome within such short distances of one another.

We were going for a hike and came across a warning sign, which I read out loud. It said we were in bear country and there was no guarantee of our safety--that we were on their turf essentially. Finn looked at me all wide eyed and earnestly asked, "Are we going to be eaten by bears?" I told him we needed to be careful and alert and to make lots of noise. Shortest hike of my life. His paranoia was heightened and he kept spotting fake bears. The rock looked like a bear, did you hear a sound like a roooaar? etc. He was really rattled by it. Yet when we were near our campsite, we saw a mother bear and her cub near a stream, walking in the opposite direction of us. And he insisted on going to that same spot every day with the hopes of spotting those bears again. He learned you can be both excited and scared of the exact same thing. And that's actually a good thing. Follow that feeling.

I hate deer flies. They are assholes.

I was nervous for this trip and my ability to pull it off, but... it was one of my favorite vacations of all time. I felt very free. Rejuvenated.