After breakfast, we headed to Yellowstone. For breakfast, I heated up some pre-made mini-pancakes. Will’s and Lucas’s approach to eating them in some inchoate way well captures the difference in their personalities.
We grabbed box lunches and chef’s salad for me in West Yellowstone, and ate a stop on the way to Old Faithful.
We stopped next at Grand Prismatic Springs. The springs are amazingly beautiful like everything else here. Will had lots of questions and wanted to smell each of the different colored springs. He is the kind of kid who needs to touch and smell everything and do little experiments (for example, he wanted to see what would happen if we poured water into the spring, which we didn’t do) to feel like her understands what he is seeing. Lucas said he was bored and wanted carried.
At Old Faithful, Jenny and the boys got ice cream at the General Store and I grabbed a seat for the next eruption. When they got back, the boys quickly set to work with another kid building a fort with logs laying on the other side of the platform. Then they found a set of sticks that looked liked guns that eventually had to be confiscated from Lucas because he wouldn’t stop pretending to shoot people, which led to lots of crying. We watched Old Faithful, where the boys again quickly found a transient friend to talk to during the eruption about then things kids think about geysers.
After dinner, I got in a dusk to darkness 10 mile run. My friend, Robert Adelman, likes to say that I am “dumbest smart man he knows.” Tonight was a good example. I planned to run the roadside trail into town and back, but at the last minute on a lark I decided to run the other direction into Gallatin National Forest. At late dusk, I found myself at the top of a mountain bounded tall grasses or thick pine forest. My evolutionary fear of getting eaten by a grizzly kicked in and I picked up the pace to get back to the road trail. Lesson learned. Earlier running the rest of the week. I am stupid, but I am teachable.
Professor No More 
The park is so beautiful. Glad you’re back safe and sound!!!
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