NOTE: This post is now almost two days behind “real-time.” We did finally make it to Yellowstone and then Grand Teton, where we are camping for the next few nights. Details on that in our next post, but first here’s yesterday’s news…

We just spent a restless night in the parking lot of Randy’s Auto Repair. Between the drunk guys coming in and out of the sketchy apartment next door, the impressive thunderstorm at midnight, and a dog with a bad stomach, it was hard to get much sleep.

We’re scheduled to have our fuel pump controller replaced this morning, but it’s after 10 am and our truck is still sitting in the lot waiting for the mechanic. While we suffer through this lowlight of our trip, we’re reminiscing about some of the recent highlights…

Sleeping in a real bed!
Thanks to the hospitality of Maureen’s relatives Tony and Celine, we spent Saturday night in their gorgeous home in wayyyyyyy northern Idaho. We enjoyed a comfortable mattress, real showers, and a huge homemade breakfast. Zora loved digging for gophers in the woods surrounding their house, and Tony even had an electrical hookup for our trailer!

Gorgeous Gorges in Glacier National Park
Glacier was the definite highlight of our trip so far–not that there’s been a ton of competition for highlights lately. We had a beautiful campsite (A35 at Fish Creek Campground, if you’re making plans), the weather was great, and the park is beautiful. I suppose the curmudgeon in me (it’s genetic on the paternal side) could complain about Going to the Sun Road being partly closed, but there were so many other beautiful things to see.

Cool Caves and Corny Comments
At what was supposed to be our only stopping point en route to Yellowstone, we camped at Lewis & Clark Caverns State Park. It was a raw and rainy day, so heading 350 feet underground into the caves seemed like a good idea. The experience itself was even better.

Our guide was friendly and enthusiastic, which almost compensated for her endless string of awful puns and jokes about caving (“watch out, there’s lots of head-banging hard rock down here”). We saw an active colony of Townsend’s big-eared bats, enjoyed colorfully-lit stalagmites and stalactites, and squeezed through claustrophobic rock passages into large underground rooms.

We woke up to a cold-but-sunny morning and got on the road early to try and get to Yellowstone before noon. And then, at a rest area 40 miles outside the park, that damn “check engine” light came back. So here we are, a day later, just a mile outside the west entrance in a repair shop parking lot, waiting to un-pause our vacation once again.

Oh yeah, and the dog still has awful diarrhea.