Day 4 - June 27th, 2012 (Part II)

This post will just be the story of yesterday. I'll add photos soon. We woke up in Yellowstone at 4 AM to 30 degree weather, showered quickly, and hit the road. We wanted to drive through Yellowstone and then Montana so instead of cutting through Utah and Nevada, we took a more northern route. And we're all so glad we did. We saw about 15-20 moose, the sunrise over a mountain and a lake nestled in its arms below, saw Old Faithful (sadly, we waited for a while but didn't get to see it erupt), and then one of the most exciting parts of the trip happened. We came around a turn and saw cars on the other side backed up. It was still a bit dark so it took a while before we saw the huge herd of bison taking up the entire road... and heading straight towards us! I guess just watch the video in the post below. Needless to say, it was just an incredible experience. We headed on through Montana where we stopped in Big Sky and Bozeman (see earlier posts for an explanation on those stops). I was thrilled to get to stop there because we had basically cut them out to conserve time. But in the name of road tripping, we decided we were going for experience over speed. We stopped at some random gas station to take a quick break and coincidentally ran into Mr. Driver, Jesse's band director from middle school. Very strange seeing someone you know in a place like that! It took a while in Montana, but it was all just breathtaking. We crossed over into Idaho and it was about the same. We went through the skinny part so it didn't take long to get through and into Washington state. The terrain changed dramatically. We were now pretty much out of the mountains and into rolling hills and miles upon miles upon acres and acres of either farm land or simply nothing. I'm still not sure what to think of our drive through Washington. Some parts were beautiful and some parts were pretty boring. When we crossed into Oregon, there was again a pretty drastic change in terrain. Suddenly, some mountains were back... not huge mountains, but they were definitely bigger than hills... and we crossed the Columbia River which we followed all the way to Portland. The drive here was pretty incredible. We stopped at Blalock Canyon, climbed a little hill, and Skyped with Mom and Dad to share the sunset with them. Just awesome. We were gonna try and get to the coast, but once it hit 11 here (Pacific time now) we were pretty drained and decided to call it a night. Stayed in a hotel this time. We plan on heading through the rest of Portland and over to the coast today where we'll drive down Highway 101 right down the coastline all the way to the Redwood Forest. We love everyone back home, hope things are going well, and we continue to appreciate your prayers! God bless, from the other side of the country.