Camping @ Yellowstone

We just got back from a wonderful family vacation to Yellowstone National Park. I was a little nervous about how Zachary was going to do traveling, but he did great! Malachi has always been a trooper when it comes to vacationing, so I was pretty sure he'd be fine. 

We saw and did a lot of things while we were there for 5 days, so I'll probably break this up into a few different posts. I just don't have time to sit and write a super long post at once with two busy boys around.

I thought today I'd talk about where we stayed. I would totally recommend camping while visiting Yellowstone. It probably would have been easier to stay in the cute little town of West Yellowstone in a motel, but we all really enjoyed camping and enjoying the outdoors all week. 

We drove the 12 hour trip to Yellowstone from our home the first day. We left our house at about 3am and managed to arrive at our campground around 4 or 4:3pm I think. 

We stayed at a campground about 10 miles outside of the park. It was about half the price of staying inside the park for the week and much less crowded. Plus, it gave us the opportunity to go fishing on the lake by the campground and to be able to drive through town each day for gas and whatever other supplies we needed. Gas and supplies in West Yellowstone were expensive, but not as much as actually IN Yellowstone.

Since Zach is still not quite walking regularly on his own, we put down a tarp next to the tent for him to play with his cars and trucks. We brought some games to play with Malachi and fishing poles. They played a lot with their Hot Wheels vehicles in the dirt.

I don't have a picture of it set up here, but we have a Zodi Instant Hot Shower with it's own shower tent, so we all had showers a couple times (heaven!). We also have a screen tent to keep the bugs off (a MUST! there were horrible mosquitos everywhere the first day!) The only thing I think I would like to get for future trips is a better cooler. I think the one we have has gone on a few too many hunting trips where it's gotten rough treatment and it didn't keep things as cold as I would have liked.

We got up early two mornings and got into the park right as the sun was coming up. Awesome!

On our way home we went a different direction and stayed for one night at a campground in the Sawtooth National Forest. Another beautiful view.

Unfortunately I gave bad directions when we left the second campground and we got going to wrong directions THROUGH the Sawtooth National Forest and then down the Pondorosa Pine Scenic Byway - beautiful - but not exactly on our original plans.... a several hundred miles out of our way. Oh well... we got to see some lovely scenery!