DC was so freaking hot! It was 93F on Saturday and we spent the whole day walking from the Union Station/Capitol Hill end of the DC Mall to the Monument/Lincoln Memorial end. Some observations:

• DC was a lot cleaner, neater and prettier than I expected. Somehow I was expecting a smaller version on Downtown LA there.
• Everything in DC is Free! All the attractions, all the museums… everything. Quite a contrast from other towns where you pay 30 bucks a pop to go up a freaking mountain or walk on a bridge.
• DC gets pretty hot in Summer.
• Lots n lots of fountains along the mall.. I saw down at them with my feet in the water to cool down:

• The White House is lame. All you can do there is to take photos from outside the gate:

• Indique: Great mango lassis! They had a stall at the Smithsonian folk life festival.

• The Smithsonian Museum(s) rock! I’ll probably spend a day or two visiting them the next time I’m in DC. This time, I got to see only the Museum of Natural History.

• What’s with the goat? One of those ‘what were they thinking when they put this exhibit up’ moments…

• That’s some pretty exclusing parking spots they’ve got here…

• Did I mention that it was HOT! It’s good to be back in the Northwest where it’s (at least slightly) cooler.

By Day 3, we were all worn out and eager to get back… Nevertheless, we did drive out to Yellowstone Lake, stopping in between at the Grand Prismatic Spring area where we saw more springs and pools…

The multicoloured Prismatic Spring

The Opal and Sapphire pools:

The lake itself had nothing to do as we reached there well after all the neighbouring businesses had closed. Gull Point was a good place to get down and walk about… some interesting wildlife and birds around.

Finally, we drove back to the park entrance via the Mud Cauldron where we saw more bison.

Tiring day and we couldn’t wait to head back the next day.

We ended up getting up pretty early on the 30th and driving straight all the way back to Seattle. 770 miles in around 12 hours – stopping only for lunch, gas and coffee 🙂

 
My favorite photo from the Yellowstone trip – a flower lying in the spring water, above Yellow sulfurous stones!

Dated: Saturday, May 27, 2006

Given how dead tired we all were after our 500 mile overnight drive, we woke up later than we should have and ended up leaving Missoula only at 11:30 or so. The drive through Montana was absolutely beautiful through green meadows, silken mountains and a long straight stretch along I-90. The weather was also a little worse today with the sun trying hard to peer through the low clouds.

We had a reservation for a cabin at the Howlin’ Mad Moon Resort outside of Cameron, Montana. We stopped at a small town named Ennis on the way where the waitress was shocked that people could survive without eating Meat.

We reached the cabin at 3 or 4pm (I was all confused by the timezone change and decided to stick to PST for all my time calculations from there on…), checked in, unloaded all our stuff into the cabin and headed out to Yellowstone.

(view from our cabin porch)

Our plan was to cover Old Faithful and, if possible, Yellowstone Lake today. Once we entered the park and headed over to the first set of geysers, the fountain pot.

Our drive within the park was punctuated with Bison sightings… while we were excited by the first few herds we saw, we soon got bored of seeing bison and longed to see some other, more exciting animal. The only other animal we say today were the mule deer which we affectionately referred to as the white-butt deer due to the color of its… posterior.

The geysers were totally out-of-the-world… like the Martian landscape you’d see in some cheesy science fiction movie. The whole area smelt of sulfur, but the view made it totally worth it. The weather sucked – the temperate was close to freezing and there were random bursts of rain and gusts of wind… in the end of May!

We reached Old Faithful at around 7pm CST and hung around at the Visitors center till its 8:10pm eruption. I came away rather unimpressed by the size of the eruption but the punctuality was definitely cool.

Dated: Friday, May 26, 2006

Ambi, Nanda, Anusha, Deepti & I headed out today to spend our long weekend in Yellowstone National Park. Given that it’s a 770 mile trip, we tried to get a head start by leaving on Friday evening with the intention of getting to Missoula, Montana by around midnight and resuming the trip in the morning.

Nanda, Ambi & I headed over to downtown to pick up the mini-van we rented by around 4pm. Our original plan was to leave Seattle by 6-6:30, but we ended up leaving from my place only by around 8 since we had some stuff, and Deepti, to pick up. The weather out of Seattle was lousy with pouring rain all the way to Snoqualmie. We heaved a sign of collective relief as we crossed the north cascades into Eastern Washington and the rain gave way to clear night skies.

The drive on to Missoula through eastern Washington was smooth all the way into Spokane and we made good time. The folks who weren’t driving, i.e. everyone except me, watched ‘Saw’ on the mini-van’s DVD player while I cruised along at 80-85mph. (The ‘features’ in the mini-van  – a Pontiac Montana – and the odd placement of controls on its dashboard probably merit an entire post of its own).

We stopped to grab a takeout dinner at a Subway in non-descript town on the way and crossed the state border into Idaho close to midnight. Somewhere along the way, Ambi took over the steering and I fell asleep in the backseat with a vague recollection of winding through the mountains roads of Idaho.

It was 3am or so by the time we reached Missoula and checked into our Hotel err… Inn. Thankfully, they had free WiFi.

Beautiful day today with sunny skies and temperatures in the late 60s..
Photos from our drive up to St Helens:

Seattle
Originally uploaded by umeshunni.

Wow – was today a picture perfect day or what? It was 70 degrees and nice and sunny.
Check out the photos we took at Kerry Park!