It’s why you go to Yellowstone isn’t it? Geysers? Old Faithful?
So we went south, clockwise around the Great Loop road from Bridge Bay Campground at 45 mph maximum, often reduced to 35 mph and occasionally to 25 miles per hour. We kept telling ourselves, “It’s not the destination, it’s the journey.” and “We’re here to see the animals, it’s their park.” Unfortunately, we didn’t see any animals bigger than Ravens and they were staying way up high, way out of our way.
We got to Old Faithful and found parking about 10 minutes before she blew and that was barely enough time to find it behind the Visitor Center – which does dominate the area. However, most of our fellow spectators clearly had no trouble finding it. I had trouble with the zoom on my camera too, so you might think we were a little disappointed, but we weren’t. 
Check out the girls’ smiles as they posed in front of Old Faithful while it calmed back down and the power of the eruption was waning. Really, it took us longer to find and order ice cream.
We retraced our path around the Great Loop, counter-clockwise this time, stopping at the Keppler Cascades before working our way back over the Continental Divide and stopping at the West Thumb Geyser Basin which doesn’t seem to have any eruptions that reach for the sky, but has fiercely hot pools of fantastic colors that change as the water overflows its cauldron’s edge and trickles toward the lake. There were mud pots where the thick bubbles popped and stunk with disolved sulfer.
Our last stop was at the edge of Yellowstone Lake and we proved first hand that the water in the lake was as numbingly cold as the water in the pools was scalding hot. The little spit of land that separated the lake from a smaller pool was made of granite gravel and was extremely cruel to bare city feet. The heat of the day which inspired that dip was quickly forgotten.
