On the road again *sing*

Day 6 started very early, because it’s been planned to be a travelling day. Our journey took us from Spokane in Washington State to West Yellowstone in Wyoming, crossing three U.S. states. But if you know us better, you’ll guess that we found lots of things to do before really starting the trip… ;-) That day was the same: we packed our tent, loaded our laptop batteries and repaired the car.

Repaired the car, what’s that about?? In Rainers package (where we’ve got the nüvi) was a power supply for the car, which converts the 12V cigarette lighter power to regular 110V power for all other devices. That’s pretty cool to load up the camera battery etc. while driving – so we wanted to use it. But as we wrote before, the cigarette lighter wasn’t working. So Andi called the car rental company to ask which fuse to change, because there was no manual inside. And the answer was: we can’t fix that, but you can come to our Spokane office and you’ll get a new car. That’s not what we actually wanted to do, packing our stuff again, losing more time…so Andi decided to simply check the internet for a manual. We found several versions, all telling us different things – so it seemed easier to check all fuses and see if they are blown. When Andi finally found the one, we went to Wal-Mart and bought a new one – and we were lucky, we changed the right fuse! But now we had to hurry as usual, because we were already 3 hours late.

By that time, we already used our nüvi a lot – and it told us that we’ll be in West Yellowstone by 7:30 pm. We were both happy and satisfied that we would be so early at our destination. When we stopped at McDonalds we saw the time in the restaurant, and it was one our later than ours! So guess what? We forgot to calculate the time lag of one hour, so our stop at McDonalds took us one hour and 20 minutes instead of only 20 minutes ;-)

When we left the highway, we wanted to fill up our car with fuel. So we were driving on and on, but there wasn’t one gas station on our way. Slowly running out of fuel, we found one – but it was closed! When we just wanted to go on, a woman came to that station and we asked her for the best way to get some gas. Luckily, she was the owner of that gas station and opened up again just for us. Puh, that was close to being stuck in the middle of nowhere…!

Finally, we arrived after 9 pm at the KOA West Yellowstone Campground. That’s when we had our first contact to a bear. On our receipt there was a note: “This is a bear area, do not leave any food, anything to drink and even shampoo or toothpaste in your tent.” We didn’t think that we would really hear or see a bear, but we were careful with the things we took into our tent. When we were lying in our sleeping bags, we suddenly heard something near by our tent. We were both a little bit afraid and Andi turned off the light quickly. Quietly we lay down but then we recognized that this wasn’t a bear, but our neighbour who snored. ;-) Happy again and laughing about our mistake we wanted to fall asleep, but then we heard a real bear roaring. Though it was quite far away, it was very impressive. Our trip to Yellowstone Nationalpark had started! See the pictures of the trip in our Yellowstone photo album.