"Do you have to make everything such a big production?"

Day 4 brought a fun-filled day, jam-packed with sight-seeing, animals and, as you can gauge from the title, slightly strained relations between the two of us.

We drove approximately 100 miles through Yellowstone yesterday (Tuesday). I saw my first buffalo, which was very exciting! Hayden Valley is my favorite spot in Yellowstone so far! That is where we saw the majority of the buffalo. The land is so open and rolling...it was very beautiful!

We stopped at West Thumb and made our way around the steaming pools...Billy decided to mock the French tourists (caught on tape), which actually provided for some comic relief.

Relations between me and the mister were feeling their first signs of strain yesterday...the title quote came directly from Billy, in reaction to an unexpected series of sneezing on my part. And apparently, he also hates the way I brush my teeth...who knew?! In his defense, I am thinking that the lack of and disrupted sleep are to blame. We both woke the night before last at 10:45 pm..why, we still don't know. I then woke up every 2 hours after that.

I also learned a valuable lesson yesterday...do not make Billy wait for lunch. We stopped at Grant Village at 11 AM. In my heart, I now know that we should have lunched then, but we decided to try our luck at the hotel up the road. After making a couple of sight-seeing stops, we made our way to Lake Hotel, which provided us two options for lunch. One was a super fancy restaurant, which was serving chopped duck salad, among other squawking entrees, and the other was a small soup and sandwich type deal, at which (again) we should have eaten, but I didn't see anything that looked good to me (BIG mistake!), so Billy conceded to go further up the road. I won't go into the entire details of our next stop, but it was a complete disaster...2 tour buses had pulled up right before we pulled in at Canyon...so, even though there were 2 restaurants, they were completely full and running on a 20 minute wait.... Now, I heard the words "20 minute wait" come from the hostesses mouth, but from behind me I heard the inner-workings of Billy's brain saying "WHY DID YOU DO THIS TO ME???!!" It was a tense few moments. Luckily, there was a small grocery store in the same plaza, so we bought a small loaf of bread, turkey and chips and picnicked outside, which was quite nice...until we noticed that the packet of turkey had an expiration date of 9/9/09.

I believe that lunch helped us to regroup, and we had a very enjoyable rest of the day. As we left the park we stopped at Old Faithful and watched it erupt. Billy's favorite quote of mine of the day came here, "Is that it?"

We checked into our hotel in West Yellowstone, and purchased tickets to a Yellowstone I-MAX movie for 8 pm. As we entered the theater and made our way to our seats, Billy looked around and commented that we were the youngest people in the room by at least 2 decades (which I have to tell you he followed up with "Well, at least I am the youngest in the room by 2 decades.") It was true...the room was filled with Blue Hairs (my dad's term for older folks). We sat there for about 25 minutes waiting for the movie to start...luckily, the theater was looping the theme to "St. Elmo's Fire" in the background...we must have heard that song at least 6 times. And if you have ever heard the song, you would know it is completely instrumental and has the most ridiculously loud saxophone solos. One of the Blue Hairs behind us said to her husband "I wish I knew what this song was called...I would like to have it on tape." Billy wept.

The movie was good...not quite what we were expecting, but interesting all the same.

Billy was literally asleep the second his head hit the pillow, and somehow, we slept all the way to 4 AM!! A new record!

Today, back to Yellowstone, upper loop, and lunch at 11 AM!