Saying Goodbye to Yellowstone

I finally make it to Grand Teton National Park and our family takes a ride on Lake Yellowstone

Sailing around Yellowstone Lake, Yellowstone National Park, July 2024

Summer means travel for my family. It also means that between commentary on life, social issues, and our years living in Texas, I will deliver two to three posts a month about our family’s summer travels until the end of the year and into January.

The following post is too long for email. You will need to open the full blog post in your browser to read the whole post. You can read the previous post about our third day in Yellowstone here.

When we reached our last day in Yellowstone, we were tired and we had already done so much. But Jeff and I still had desires and it required some compromise.

I had always wanted to make a trip to Grand Tetons National Park a part of our vacation. When I first started mapping out our trip a year before, I included a few days in Jackson, Wyoming so we could spend at least one day exploring the national park. As we got closer to nailing down dates, it became painfully clear to me that I couldn’t justify the extra miles and time.

But our campsite in Yellowstone was just over an hour from the entrance to Grand Teton National Park. We were about an hour and a half from the Colter Bay Visitor Center. And the kids and I wanted it to be the last national park of our vacation.

So I offered to drive our family (Jeff had done almost all of the driving by this point) to Colter Bay, where we stopped for pictures, stamps in our passport books, and lunch at Cafe Court Pizzeria, fulfilling all of our desires for a good restaurant meal. It was a short trip, but it fulfilled my desire to say I had done something in a national park I had driven through twice without really stopping. (One of the highways exiting Yellowstone goes straight through the Grand Tetons, so if you are going through Jackson, Wyoming after leaving Yellowstone, you are going to see them. Seriously, if you are taking that route, just stop. It’s worth it.)

Then it was Jeff’s turn to get his wish.

Jeff wants a boat. He’s been talking about his desire for a boat for years. But we have a camper we love and are still paying off, so I keep putting off his boat desires.

But he wasn’t passing up the chance to rent a boat and drive out on Yellowstone Lake.

As he piloted the boat out of the inlet, we sailed past an elk that had stopped traffic on the bridge as we drove to the marina.

Then we spent the next 45 minutes sailing around the large bay, the cold wind off the lake cooling us as the hot sun baked our skin. While Jeff reveled in picking up speed and slowing down to take in the views of snow-capped mountains in the distance, the rest of us enjoyed the relaxing family time.

There is so much to do in Yellowstone and there are other activities we could have prioritized. After all, Jeff never got back out to take a longer bike ride on one of the many possible trails and I didn’t get to take a longer hike off of the main drag (which made our bear spray rental pointless), but our two teenagers still said it was the best vacation we had ever taken. We were going to take that as a win as we prepared for the long haul home.

Get a copy of my planning spreadsheet below:

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