Traveling to Yellowstone

I was very proud of my family on the morning of Saturday, August 2. I told them I wanted to leave at 4:00 a.m. because I wanted to arrive at the condo (12.5 hours of driving away) before dinner. Everyone was up and helped finish loading the van and climbed in with no complaints. We left at 4:15 a.m., which was actually 15 minutes before I REALLY wanted to leave. LOL! There was some sleeping during those early morning hours, and it was definitely quiet. We had a great morning of travel and made good time and I was excited about the possibility of unloading in the daylight and having time to swim and cook dinner at the condo!

We stopped for gas about an hour outside of Yellowstone. While we were pumping gas an ambulance and a police car went flying by. Soon after, we found out why…

We were stopped in a long line of vehicles due to what turned out to be a 4-vehicle, 12-person, very serious accident. And there we sat.

Sarah took pictures. We did some walking. We were about a 15 minute walk from the crash site. We tried to find a bathroom, without success. And, as you can see…there was no crouching behind a bush happening, either.

We watched one ambulance make several trips back & forth and also watched a medical helicopter land near the crash site and take off in the direction of Billings, we think.

While waiting 2.5 hours for the crash to be cleared was inconvenient and caused us to not reach our condo until well after dark and had us eating trail mix in the van for dinner, we were thankful that we had stopped for gas and hadn’t either witnessed or been involved in that accident.

We could walk around and take pictures and enjoy the beautiful surroundings. Montana is really stunning.

We talked to a few people here and there, but mostly the mood was solemn. Everyone knew once the helicopter came that it was a serious accident. We prayed for those people.

It wasn’t the way I had imagined our trip. But our 12 year old van with over 200K miles got us there with no problems and we had been spared any accidents. We were grateful and eager to meet up with the cousins the next morning and see Yellowstone!