Day 8

Diego Reporting: Few kilometres after leaving Deadwood we stopped to fill the gas tank. To our surprise, as small as the gas station looked, we were able to get wireless i-net from the van. After chatting, what to me seemed few minutes but was actually more like 1,5 hours, with Amanda it was already too late, so we decided to spend the night there. We failed to our classic accommodation (The highway rest areas) and gave it a chance to the truck parking of the gas station. Even there was some trucks movement that waked me up a few times at night, it was good.

Next day, early in the morning we started a new highway journey. The road to Yellowstone was very nice. The prairies, made me remember of some areas of Argentina, and later the Rocky Mountains, spectacular to see but made all our attempts to keep low the gas consumption (about 90% of our trip costs so far) fail. In one of the several stops we did in the mountains to admire the sight and take pictures, we saw a group of people getting ready to jump from a pick about 800- 1000 meters high with their hang-gliders. It made me shake just to see what they where about to do, one wrong step and that was it. We watch two of them take of and keep on adding kms to the Aceituna.

After 2485km, 250lt of gas and 27 hours of driving since we left Guelph, we arrived to Yellowstone National Park, the first national park of the world where one of the main attractions is the geysers. Volcanic eruptions thousands of years ago shaped the lands of the park and the same magmatic heat powering those eruptions powers hot springs, fumes and the geysers today.

But not everything is that nice. The Grizzly bears that can be very cute when watching in Discovery Channel made me kite scared (nothing happened don’t be alarmed). I have been listening to stories about attacks since Canada and here we are just on one of the places were you might have an encounter with them. I know that one should not be afraid, but careful. However, I can not avoid it (the same with sharks). May be it is because I am not familiar with them; we do not have bears in Argentina. So we decided to buy a bear deterrent and I did not go even to the washrooms (that were 20 m from the van) without it. I have been even practicing to became faster (if not the faster in the west) in taking it from my pocket, removing the safety clip and aiming (Ryan play as the grizzly bear). Just like Buffalo Bill did with his gun but with pepper spry. I would like to tell you that I had an encounter with a bear and thanks to my skills with the pepper spry I was able to save some children, but the real thing is that we did not see a bear even from the car.

Now we are heading to Seattle. Write mails, love you,

The Aceituna and its crew

Hang-gliders jumping from the Rockies

Ryan checking out a WW2 Mosquito flow by the Royal Canadian Air Force.

Camping at Yellowstone 

Diego by the water at Yellowstone

Old Faithful