Afternoon in West Yellowstone

August 3 – After breakfast and general house stuff, I got busy on the computer to catch up on my blogging and journaling.  Amelia, the granddaughter of the owners of the park, came to visit.  She’s going to feed and visit with Molly while we stay over at Yellowstone one night.

Some of the tents

Once we had lunch and showered it was 2 pm and we headed into West Yellowstone.  The first stop was the Mountain Men Rendezvous just before entering town.  They

One of the mountain men working
on a bow

had about 15 tents set up with men and women in costume of the mountain men/women.  Some were performing the trades of the time such as making leather shoes and moccasins and making bows and arrows.  All of the tents were displays of their many crafts including clothing, jewelry, weapons, things made from animal pelts and parts and pottery.  We bought a few things for Shiloh and Jude and Bill considered buying a beaver pelt as they had the best price we’d seen but he ended up passing.  The event is all week and he said he’d think about it.

In town we made a post office stop and then we dropped off the mud flap to a body shop where they are going to drill new holes in it.  One hole tore through so if they move them 2 inches over Bill thinks we can still use it.  We have to pick it up tomorrow.

"Flo" another of the painted
buffalo

Then we explored the rest of the shops in town for a while.  I bought some ornaments and huckleberry lip balm.  We checked out where the movie theatre is and then settled on dinner at the Slippery Otter.  They do a special every night and luckily for Bill it was meatloaf Monday.  He received a huge portion and only ate half so he has leftovers.  I had a delicious Steak salad.  It came with blue cheese so I went with blue cheese dressing and enjoyed every bite.  The young man (28) who was our server was a very interesting guy.  He and his wife are full time RV’ers which is very unusual.   This is their 3^rd summer in West Yellowstone and they earn enough to travel the other 8 months of the year.  They have an older paid off RV and leave their cars in Arkansas and California to use in the winter and walk or ride their bikes around town.  They unhook and drive the RV to Bozeman when they need to stock back up on groceries and supplies.  We definitely enjoyed chatting with him.

The movie theatre has 125 seats but show newly released movies.  We saw Mission Impossible.  Tickets were reasonable, $16 for the 2 of us and concessions prices were also reasonable but we were stuffed from dinner.

I was glad so many cars were headed in our direction when we left due to the possibility of wild animals on the road.  Gradually the further we got to the campground more cars turned off but we made it safely home without hitting a moving object.