Tuesday, June 22 – Sunday, June 27

Tuesday morning, we left Grant Village around 6:30am and headed south through the John D. Rockfeller, Jr. Memorial Highway and on into Grand Teton National Park. The Gypsy Guide we purchased for Yellowstone included both the highway and Tetons. John D. Rockefeller Jr. was a pretty cool guy. Apparently around the early 1900’s ranchers in the Teton Valley were selling but they did not want to sell to the government. Mr. Rockfeller bought up the properties under the name Snake River Land Co. and then sold them off to the government with the goal of creating Grand Teton National Park. This was a mulitgenerational project and it was not completed until just recently in the 2000s. He apparently did similar projects with other national parks – notably, Acadia National Park in Maine.

We arrived at Jenny Lake Visitor Center by 9am, much too late to snag RV parking.  So we went a half a mile down the road and had breakfast at a turnout there.   It was right next to the bike path which runs the length of the park and was built as a response to a little girl getting killed by a car biking along the main road. We took our bikes and road them up to the visitor center.   At the gift shop, Arthur saw a coyote from inside the store.  There was a cool relief map outdoors. This is also the place to take a boat ride across Jenny Lake. There is so much to do here but we only have 2 days. When we got back to the RV we headed up to Colter Bay where we were staying the night.  Upon exploring the RV park we found a swim beach!   And people were swimming!   I had packed swim suits for the off chance that we might stay at a KOA along to way, but never expected to swim in Jackson Lake. We took the afternoon to just relax in the lake.   There were so many minnows swimming around, about a finger long in length, and all the kids tried to catch them.  A shout out to Arthur for jumping in the cold water first!

Colter Bay was like a resort compared to our last week. We had a full hook up – which means we had water, electricity and sewer. This is in direct contrast to our last week of camping without any of those amenities. Colter Bay also had a grocery store, pizza place, gift shops, and a visitor center. We had pizza for dinner and took a hike around the campground on Lakeshore Trail.  This hike went around the beach out around an island connected to a peninsula by a small land bridge.  It was unfortunately quite mosquitoey – but we had put on bug spray this time.   At one point we gazed up at the sun shining down on an uphill section and we saw a ton of mosquitos.   I said to the kids watch out – the fairies are there and they all quickly put their hands up to their ears to close off their ears.  At Fairy falls, to amuse the kids on that long trek, I made up a story of evil fairies that farm kids’ ear wax and use it to light their lamps. Those lamps are what you see glow at night. Silly, funny, ridiculous, but incredibly hilarious.

Wednesday, we relaxed in the morning and then headed south to the Craig Discovery Center – which was closed.  All the visitor centers except Badlands, Colter Bay, and the dam at Cody have been closed – which was an extreme disappointment and reason to do this trip all over again.   We went 13 miles more to Jackson (saw a moose on the way), and saw the visitor center there – which was open but it wasn’t very big.   There was a beautiful mural depicting the 5 habitat zones of the area (alpine, supalpine, conifer, sagebrush/grassland, and reptarian/wetland).  Heading to our campground for the evening, we stayed at the Gros Ventre campground in A71 – absolutely the best site for views (highly recommend to get this site again).  We got everyone ready for their hike up Blacktail butte but storms rolled in and we ended up just hiking 2 miles in the sagebrush.  We did hike a bit along the Gros Ventre river and it was a gorgeous, almost full moon evening.

Thursday we left the campground by 7am.  On the way out of the Tetons via Highway 26, we stopped and took some Ansel Adams photos at Snake River. We drove through Dubois, Lander and ended at Rawlings where we met up with Interstate 80 around 5pm and right ahead of a very windy storm. So it was good that we didn’t plan on a morning hike in the Tetons. We stayed at Western Hill Campground.

Over the next three days, we drove ~1500 miles staying at Grand Island KOA in Nebraska, then Fisherman’s Corner on the Mississippi River, stopped at Indiana Dunes State Park and then finally home. But this trip was it for us. When we returned that summer we tried to convince ourselves that Ohio was our home, but we couldn’t shake that feeling that there was more for us to explore out west. In would be a few more months and a trip to Florida before the decision was realized and accepted on our parts that we had to move out west.