Preparing for Yellowstone

I did not grow up camping.  I’m mostly an insidey kind of gal.

David *did* grow up camping.  In a tent.  In places other than his own back yard.

Now that we are married, that has meant that we are not a camping family.  The kids must have inherited a fascination with nature from David’s family, though, because when Cee was given an opportunity to receive her “one true wish” from Make-A-Wish, she chose visiting Yellowstone National Park.

Yeah.

For real.

I was a little overwhelmed at all that goes into a trip like this…the packing, the flying, the dangerous thermal features and wild animals.  In the weeks leading up to our first vacation ever, I wanted as much information as possible.  For a regular person, it would be like getting chosen to travel to Mars.  You’d want to do a little reading up ahead of time.

“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” according to Benjamin Franklin and parents flying with children.

First off, I checked out every book and DVD our library had on Yellowstone.  Here are the 3 most helpful items:

Death in Yellowstone might seem like an odd choice, but as a generally anxious person, this gave me all the statistics and information on the dangers we would encounter.  For example, none of the deaths caused by bears involved groups of three or more people.  That means staying in a group increases safety.   Deaths related to the thermal features either involved people walking off the boardwalks or being careless.  That means staying out of the places that say “Stay out!” decreases risk as well.

Some of the information was a little dry, but I was happy to skim.  Overall, this book helped ease many of my worries.

 

 

 

 

Moon’s Guide included information about the Grand Tetons, which was also a part of our trip.  I appreciated the organization and detail in this book.  Searching online took tons of time; flipping through this book was much easier.  The information on tourist sights, restaurants, lodging, hiking was all thorough without being overwhelming. We visited some of the places mentioned in the book and found the descriptions accurate.

 

 

 

 

Wild Yellowstone is put together with characters (the animals), conflict, suspense, and a little gore.  We watched it as a family.  I did fast forward when things were starting to steam up during mating season because I wasn’t sure exactly how much was going to be shown, but other than that it was enjoyable.  It made the kids (and me!) excited for what we were going to see.

 

 

 

We also watched the videos available on this site and listened to the sounds on this site.

The kids did coloring pages from here.

 

There were silly things we did the week of to prepare.  I had the kids make any animals or things that they might find in Yellowstone out of duplos, and we left their masterpieces on display.

 

For a snack one day, I shaped their watermelon pieces into the vague shape of Old Faithful.

 

 

They spent a lot of free time “playing wolves.”  Occasionally I couldn’t weasel out of playing with them, but they graciously allowed me to play the role of “mother wolf who has been shot and can just lay in the den while the pups go hunting and bring food back while she gets better.”  It wasn’t the worst role I’ve been assigned in their imaginative play.

Since we’ve never flown as a family before, I did do a fair amount of research on flying with kids.  Ultimately we decided to bring our stroller and no car seats, to give each kid his or her own backpack as a carry on, and to wear our MakeAWish shirts on the plane.

We went back and forth about wearing MAW shirts because  1. it’s hard to accept what that means, and 2. it makes us more of a spectacle than the spectacle that we already are as a family of 6.  But…since we didn’t know how anyone was going to handle flying, we figured we should wear the MAW shirts in order to garner sympathy in case something happened.

If one of the littles was going to spend the whole flight screaming/throwing up on a seatmate/pooping while the seat belt light was on, we were going to need all the slack that could be cut.

 

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