There’s a delight in traveling with my mother-in-law, as regardless of how fast I may want to bolt through a landscape, she’s not going to indulge me by running behind me. In any case, that would just be rude, and so I get to slow down and spend more contemplative time taking in details I may have otherwise passed by. While I will prod her to stay awake on our drives so she can see where she’s been out here, she effectively sets the pace. Something else that adds to the positive experience of bringing her on these excursions is that she shares with us the same level of enthusiasm, the enjoyment of basking in the beauty of it all, and lets us know how beguiled she is.

Jutta is just as likely to pause to inspect a leaf, a particular stone that’s caught her eye, an insect, the patterns in the ice, or the evolving shades in the morning and late-day skies. She hears birds that I’ve tuned out while I’m listening to venting gasses, and then she brings them to my attention, though I’m of little value in identifying them by their call for her.

We ventured out into the Upper Geyser Basin here in front of the Old Faithful Inn early this morning and spent about four hours meandering along the boardwalk and trails out to the Morning Glory Pool and then back again. Our bags are packed and loaded in the car. We are staying up in Mammoth Hot Springs for a couple of nights, but before we start our drive north, we need some lunch.

Heading out into Lamar Valley in the northeast corner of the park with considerably better weather than we had earlier in the year.

If time allowed, we would park the car and walk out following the stream and then maybe cut across to the forest before seeing if there was a safe way to head up the mountainside for a view back this way. Instead, we’ll have to sate ourselves with a hundred stops along the road to jump out of the car for a closer look and stare for a longer moment than driving by at 30 mph allows. If ever there was a park in America that would benefit from having a parallel bike path next to the road, Yellowstone is it.

While technically, Jutta has now been to Montana, it hardly counts just crossing the state line; I can already see a visit to Glacier National Park in the future.

This is one of those curiosities that Jutta needed a photo in front of as she’d never stood on the 45th Parallel before.

We are heading out of the park for Jutta’s second visit to Montana, this time to Gardiner, where we are looking for dinner. What we found was Helen’s Corral Drive-in burger joint where we had the opportunity to try our first elk burger ever. As I said earlier, we are staying at Mammoth Hot Springs, and for the next two nights, we’ll have a small cabin to call home.