It has been another one of those long periods between blogs. We have wanted to report on our Wyoming vacation, but this last week has been crazy.
Last Tuesday was Shelley's last day of work. She will be starting school this Monday. She has already spent a bucket load of money on books and a tablet computer. Robert, on the other hand, has a whole story to tell himself. Before Robert's story, we'll talk about our Wyoming vacation.
We started our vacation on Saturday, August 8. We went along with Shelley's parents and 2 of her brothers, Cris and Dan. We visited Scott Porter which is an old friend of Shelley's family. He took us through a tour of the newspaper print shop that he is one of the managers for.
On Sunday, we went to Jackson Hole Wyoming and stayed that night there.
We went to Yellowstone on Monday and saw the mud volcano and the upper and lower falls.
On Tuesday, we went to see Old Faithful and a bunch of other geysers. We also saw a bunch of stinky hot spring pools.
On Wednesday, we saw the Steamboat Geyser and went to a great view point of the Lower Falls.
When we left Yellowstone, we started heading towards Riverton where we planned to stay 2 nights. Our car broke down, We were barely able to get into Thermompolis which is about 55 miles away from Riverton. The nearest dealer from there is Lander which is another 25 miles, so we had to have the car towed about 80 miles. We had already coordinated with Service at the dealer that we would be dropping off the car and they would have a loner available. Below is a message my car displayed on our way to Thermopolis:
On Thursday, we found out that it would take several days for the dealer to get needed parts for our car. We used the loner to go with the rest of our bunch to Independence Rock, Martin's Cove, and the Willie handcart memorial.
We decided to get a rental car at Hertz that we could drop off in the Phoenix area. We picked it up and drove with the rest of our party to Monticello on Friday, and then to home in Mesa on Saturday. Robert will explain in first person how he got the car back.
Robert -
Just to make sure there isn't any confusion. I wrote the above part of this entry, but kept it as "We" since it was an experience that Shelley, Luke and I had together, but I am now going to relate the experience I had myself getting our car back.
Before we left Wyoming, Shelley had already booked a flight for me from Phoenix to Denver to Riverton so I didn't have to drive both ways to get the car.
I woke up early in the morning on Friday, August 21 (yesterday). It was a pretty standard flight to Denver, but a bit different going to Riverton. Riverton is not the biggest town on the block. Its airport only has one gate and the runway is only big enough to bring in small aircraft. Anyway, when I got to the Denver airport, I had to go down to the ground level to find the gate I needed. This was the type of gate that you had to walk outside and the take steps up into the plane.
A driver was at the Riverton airport to pick me up and take me to the dealership in Lander. I picked it up and drove 9 hours to my parents in Cannonville, UT.
This morning I woke up early and drove just over 7 hours to Mesa. Kinda Crazy.
Well, our Prius is working again and getting as good of gas mileage as ever. I only had to fill up twice through the trip.
