Tidbits
Sleepover at Ikea - Maybe this is the only way to get to the $1 early enough…
A ramen bath - Japanese spa with special baths resembling instant noodles. I wanna play!
Old age homes for dogs - 1) Old dogs don’t like to be abandoned at strange places. 2) Playing with young puppies will probably cause the older dogs to die faster due to exhaustion.
A remote-controlled pigeon - Oh the poor thing…
An article on a brilliant method of teaching grade schoolers about bats and rabies. I smell a lawsuit.
Will trade beer for Crumpler bags. Tempted by the beanbag and messenger bags…
Photos
Yellowstone 2010
July 30, 2010, 10:10 pm
Our major summer trip this year was to Yellowstone National Park. We were there for the last two weeks of June until before Canada Day, for around 10 days. I went with my parents and Mike. Yellowstone is on my list of places to visit because of how famous it is, but really all I knew about it is Old Faithful and maybe the bisons. It turns out that Old Faithful was one of the least interesting attractions there.
Another thing I didn’t expect about the park was how middle of nowhere it is, and how annoying it is to get to from Toronto. The closest airport would be Jackson Hole Airport, but it’s a teeny airport and you can only fly to it from a small handful of US cities (and um, one flight to Central America to make it an “international” airport). The next closest would be Billings, Montana (fyi, there’s no sales tax in Montana), but again, good luck finding any affordable AC flights that will take you there. We ended up flying to Salt Lake City and driving from there. It’s about 6 hours drive, not terribly long, but still a waste of a day.
Secondly, accommodations within the park during the busy months are scarce and hard to come by. My mom booked our hotels (rustic cabins) six months in advance. Hotels in the nearby cities outside the park are also not cheap, and are more than an hour’s drive away anyways.
I think we spent a total of six or seven days within the park itself, which is a good length of time to explore all the different areas in the park. The park is huge, and there are 7-8 major regions to visit. Just checking out all the major drive-to attractions was enough to fill our week. And each region is worth checking out, as the terrain differs quite widely. There are lakes, rivers, canyons, forests, rolling hills, hot springs, mountains.
I enjoyed the hot spring areas the most. I’ve never seen such colourful thermal pools before, I didn’t know they could be all these different rainbow shades. Other areas look like corals at bottom of the ocean, or look like the surface of the moon or something.
A close second is the wildlife. In the week we were there, we pretty much saw all the major animals you can find there, except for wolves, moose, and grizzly bears. Bison were all over the park (and the restaurants love to serve bison meat, which they emphasized came from farms outside the park of course), which is a little scary since they are huge animals.
We also saw a fair number of elks around Mammoth. One day, for some reason, they all decided to come into town in the middle of the day to hang out.
Black bears are supposed to be harder to see, but one afternoon, we saw four different bears, each one closer and closer.
Though I think you need to spend more time in the park, and be a bit off from the major crowded areas, to see more animals.
The Canyon area is also quite impressive. They call it the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone and I think it’s nicer than the real Grand Canyon. Having the waterfalls, the narrower canyon, and the river at the bottom made for some incredible scenery.
The Old Faithful Geyser though, was way too touristy. It’s in a huge open area ringed by three major hotels. There are benches all around it, and it’s always crowded with people when it erupts. It reminded me of those water fountain shows they have at casinos, but much less interesting.
We didn’t end up doing too much serious hiking there. I don’t think I would feel comfortable going into the backcountry with all these bears and bison running around. We did do this horseback riding Old West Dinner Cookout thing that was quite fun. No previous riding experience is required; they just throw you on a horse and lead everyone up steep switchback trails and along the edge of a cliff. It was actually really fun, the scenery was really nice. At the end of the ride, we had the Old West dinner, lots of people, very touristy, but the food was decent.
The weather was rather particular during our visit there. It was uncharacteristically hot and sunny (only complaining cause no buildings there have AC). My parents arrived there a few days before I did and said it was cold and drizzly, dropping to 5 degrees at night. When we arrived, the temperature was constantly around 30s. Probably why the animals were so active.
For photos, I have a quick selection on flickr, but most are on Facebook.
Tagged: Travels
1000 Islands for Victoria Weekend
June 03, 2010 | Travels |
Had a nice little vacation in the Thousand Islands area over the Victoria long weekend. The 1000 Islands area is a little east of Kingston, with the main tourist area at Gananoque. So first, it was nice to only have to drive 3 hrs to get to our destination for once, and second, it was the perfect weekend to spend near the water, being so hot and sunny. We left Toronto on Saturday morning and came back Monday night.
Not ready for summer
April 02, 2010 | Shopping |
I’m so not prepared for the crazy summer weather we have this weekend. I remember last weekend being like -5 and freezing. How can it be 25+ just a week later? The weather forecast algorithms must be so confused; it is predicting negatives again for later this week. I…
Ah California, where you can surf in the morning and ski in the afternoon!
February 23, 2010 | Travels |
Mike wanted to go skiing at Tahoe this season, and had vacation booked for the Family Day week even before we decided to go to Vancouver for New Years. And even after Vancouver and Whistler, he still wanted to go to California. We then realized that the weekend leading…
2nd Adirondacks Weekend
October 23, 2009 | Travels |
Over the Canadian Thanksgiving weekend, we went to Adirondacks park in Upstate New York. We figured it would be good to go somewhere in the US on a Canadian long weekend, but alas, they have their US Columbus Day weekend then as well. The last time we were there…
