Our latest Trip

So this past week, Athena (me) and the kids (James, Jenni and Emma) went on our annual trek to the cabin. Dirk had to work and we have another trip planned up there in three weeks, so this was kind of a bonus trip. For those of you that don't know, we have a cabin in Island Park, Idaho about thirty minutes from Yellowstone National Park. Dirk's family owns it and we share it with his family. We've been going up for 16 years now and there are many fond memories. We usually fish, fish, hike, fish, kayak, fish, go into the park, fish, play games, and oh yeah, we fish. This year was a little different. There was still snow in places up at the cabin and the spring runoff made the river very high and extremely cold, so the kayaking was out of the question. It got to about 49 degrees high and was rainy off and on. So the weather made it a little uncomfortable to do too much outside. Still, we had a lot of fun (the warm stuff like kayaking and floating down the river will occur when we go back in July). We still fished a lot. At one point, I had a good sized fish on my line and it got away. Next thing I know, Jenni starts hollering that she had a fish and couldn't reel it in. So I get behind her and we reel it in. It's a cutthroat trout that measured 16 inches. Now we got lots of rainbow trout (more than 20), but this cutthroat had beautiful pink meat and was bigger than all the others. So, Jenni wins the fishing award for this trip. Mind you, Jenni and James have to bait, cast, and catch their own fish (James also has to gut his). Emma ends up getting all the ones I hook. They have gotten really good at it and I am hearing "can I go fishing with you?" or "when can we go, I know it's raining, but I have a raincoat". They love it as much as I do. On Wednesday, we went into Yellowstone National Park to enjoy and see the animals. For the fourth year in a row, we saw bears up close and personal. What a fun experience. Some of the animals we saw were: a grizzly bear and her cub, a black bear and her two cubs, a moose, a coyote, a herd of big horn sheep, a buffalo merging into the road in front of us, a herd of buffalo with their young, elk, and more elk, even some bull elk, pronghorn antelope, white tailed deer and other smaller animals, prairie dogs, and marmots and squirrels. James said this trip into Yellowstone would have been perfect if we had seen a wolf. I think it would have been perfect if I had remembered my purse. I got all the way into West Yellowstone and forgot my purse (and my gas light was on). So I had to call my dad (at 7am) and he gave me my gas card number over the phone and I was able to get gas, but I had no cash or cards to buy anything. Thankfully we packed lots of food for the trip - we just didn't buy anything. At the end of the day, my mom and dad met us in West Yellowstone for dinner at a great Mexican restaurant where we celebrated James' birthday and I got my purse back. One crazy thing was that it snowed on us while we were driving through the park. The snow was so high in places, it was higher than our car and it felt like we were driving through a tunnel. Other places in the park, the snow was gone - that tells you the difference in altitude in places throughout Yellowstone. The kids stopped at the Continental Divide and we saw the river from a lake literally go in two different directions (toward the Atlantic and Pacific oceans). Sorry for the long stories - we just had a lot of fun and I wanted to share all the fun stuff with you. More from the cabin when we go up in a few weeks. (Oh, the bald eagle was just sitting in the river outside the cabin - I was cooking breakfast and looked out the window and it was just sitting there - usually where the moose hangs out.)