More Yellowstone National Park

This post covers the early afternoon of Friday, May 14, 2010 — Day 21: Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming to Jackson Hole, Wyoming. You can read about the activities we did in the morning here.

We arrived at the Old Faithful Geyser, probably the biggest attraction in the park, around lunch time. As the name indicates, it is a geyser that can be counted on to erupt every 60 to 110 minutes. How long one eruption lasts indicates how long it will be before the next eruption, so a naturalist keeps tabs on the eruptions and posts a sign indicating when they think the next one will occur. It was nice to look at the sign and know we had some time to kill before the next eruption. Instead of sitting outside in the cold, we wandered into the nearby General Store and had lunch.

Shortly before the estimated spout time, we found seats in front of the geyser and settled in for the show. The water temperature inside the vent is 204 degrees Fahrenheit, so some steam generally comes out of the geyser most of the time.

The steam steadily grew in intensity, then some water started to spout out with the steam:

And then she really blew, Continue reading

February 2012 Update On Us

A couple months ago, we mentioned that World Footprints Media was running a Best Photo Contest called “I LOVE To Travel.” One of the prizes was a copy of both our books. In our last update, we forgot to mention that the winner of our books was Sarah S. of Pennsylvania. Congrats to Sarah!

We have gotten more feedback on The Unexpected Circumnavigation: Unusual Boat, Unusual People Part 2: Australia to OmanSo far, all the feedback has been good, with more than half of the people telling us they like Part 2 better than Part 1. We would be grateful if people who have read the books would rate them on Lulu or Amazon.

We’re still trying to finish up the Recipe for Success: What My Cruising Will Cost Me workbook. As we said in the last update, the workbook’s content is mostly complete; the hold up is formatting challenges. With so much going on with getting ready for the baby, it has been easy to procrastinate on the re-formatting, but we are still slowly plugging away at it.

In personal news, Christi Continue reading

Yellowstone National Park

As we mentioned in our last post a few days ago, we are finally going to finish the Passage Across America series about our trip across the USA and back. The last post we put up in the thread covered Keystone, South Dakota to Yellowstone National Park (which is located mostly in Wyoming, with a little bit in Montana and Idaho, as well). Since that post only contained pictures, in this post, we’ll fill in some of the story.

Knowing reservations to stay in the lodges in Yellowstone needed to be made at least a year in advance, we had brought camping gear and planned to camp inside the park. However, on May 11th and 12th, it snowed. We had no idea that in the northern latitudes snow still fell so late in the year. We just assumed it would be warm and balmy; none of our camping gear was meant for super cold weather.

Not wanting to freeze to death, on the morning of the 13th, we desperately tried to find a hotel room in or around the park. We called Yellowstone’s switch board, who thought we were trying to make reservations for next year. When we clarified we meant that very night, they didn’t know what to do! They didn’t normally deal with last minute callers. After checking with a manager, we were told they had one and only one room available. We had lucked out! Knowing we had a place to stay, we proceeded to Yellowstone, as planned.

Yellowstone sits on top of one of the largest active volcanoes on earth. It last erupted 640,000 years ago, and the force of the eruption made the volcano collapse into a 45 mile by 35 mile steaming caldera (crater), one of the largest in the world. A hot spot of magma still remains under the park, creating unique hydrothermal features. Due to its unique landscape, Yellowstone became the world’s first national park in 1872.

We spent the night at the Old Faithful Snow Lodge, an upscale hotel.

We had a phenomenal Continue reading

The Passage Across America Road Trip Series

Since returning from our circumnavigation, we’ve started several threads we’ve never finished. Christi’s new year resolution for 2012 is to finish up all the loose threads on the blog. Last month, we finished up a series on our recent trip to San Francisco in Kosmos. The next thread she is tackling is our Passage Across America on One Load of Fuel.

To give a quick refresher course: upon returning home from our circumnavigation in May 2009, we bought a diesel Jetta. Eric soon realized that we could carry enough fuel in the car to make it all the way across the country (San Diego to Maine, about 3,000 nautical miles — oddly enough, the same range as Kosmos!) without ever stopping at a gas station. So to celebrate the one year anniversary of the circumnavigation, in Spring 2010 we drove across the USA and back (with a small jaunt into Canada).

We put up several posts on the trip. Since we Continue reading

Outfitting Kosmos For a Baby — Bassinet, Stroller and Car Seat

We know there are a few readers who are in our age group that will probably have kids soon, as well as many blog readers who are anticipating grandkids in the near future. So, for those of you, we’re starting a series on baby stuff. If you don’t fit the baby demographic, fear not! We promise the blog will still focus primarily on boating and travel, not on babies. But in order continue our boating/traveling lifestyle with our new crew member, we do have to outfit the boat properly.

Needless to say, which such limited room onboard, we need relatively small items that are easy to secure and/or stow away. We also want the gear to be lightweight so it is easy to get on and off the boat.

Our first concern was a place for the baby to sleep. Nowadays, the “experts” advise parents that the baby should sleep in the same room as mom and dad for the first 3 – 4 months, but not in mom and dad’s bed. Conveniently enough, we found the Fisher-Price Newborn Rock N Play Sleeper, which is a folding bassinet that fits in the small space between Christi’s side of the bed and the wall. What was even more exciting about this bassinet is that it is angled, which makes it easier for babies to sleep when they are suffering from indigestion or stuffy noses. It also rocks forward and back, which babies supposedly find more soothing than side to side motion. And, it is “bouncy,” so it jiggles slightly every time the baby moves and/or takes little effort for parents to jiggle it. Babies supposedly like the jiggling motion. When Christi was doing research, she was amazed by the rave reviews — there were over 600 reviews on Amazon and most of them were 5 stars! The plan is to set the bassinet up at bed time, then fold it away in the morning.

Last time we took Kosmos out, we Continue reading