The Adventures of Myron and Dorcas: Yellowstone National Park Part II

I have been in Yellowstone National Park perhaps 6-8 times, but never in the summer. Every time I have been here in the past was before Memorial Day or after Labor Day, which has always been a great time to be here. I had heard horror stories about the traffic jams and the crowds in the summer, so I was apprehensive about going to Yellowstone at all during the month of July. Of course, we came anyway.

Tourists! Taking up all our camping sites!

Well, our impression so far is, it ain't so bad. Sure, when a chipmunk crosses the road, traffic grinds to a halt and the camera flashes drive the poor critter into an epileptic seizure. And there can be parking issues (fist fights) at some of the pull-outs, particularly at the more popular features. But it wasn't as bad as we expected. In fact, shortly into our stay at Grant Village, I started trying to get more nights in the park. Most of the major campgrounds are by-reservation only (Madison CG being an exception). It is a risk to depend on getting a spot at the smaller first come campgrounds. First, you need to get there early in the morning, and second, most of those have smaller sites and only a very limited number of sites big enough for our rig. If you miss, you're screwed and have to drive a hundred miles to find a place outside the park. So I got on-line looking for a reservation for some days after our stay ended at Grant Village. No luck. Finally I called the reservation phone number, and a guy found us three nights at Bridge Bay CG, only 19 miles north of our current site at the other end of Yellowstone Lake. Sweet! I did tell a minor fib however. I gave the operator the correct length of our coach but, when asked, I told him we were not towing a car. How could that matter? I think this helped us get the site, but it did cause minor a problem later.

So, on Tuesday we packed up and moved a whopping 19 miles to Bridge Bay CG. We checked in and were assigned site A-9. At first glance A-9 seemed to be a huge pull through site,just adjacent to the pavement on the loop road. But wait a minute. What's that white line painted across the pavement half way along the length of our site? And why does it say A-10 just beyond that line? Crap, they did it to us again. That mile-long pull-through was actually two separate sites. I pulled all the way up so my bumper was even with the white line, and my front mirrors actually intruded about a foot into A-10. There was nobody currently parked in A-10, but there was some gear on the picnic table. Obviously a small van-type camper would be coming back, and it wouldn't matter that we were slightly trespassing. The reason we needed as much space as we did was because there was no place to park the car. Park rules say all wheels must be on the pavement, but not in the roadway. Well, we only had about 6' behind us to park the car. I finally did manage to get the car in diagonally between the coach, a boulder and the fiberglass site marker, with Dorcas using her new parking gestures again. It was not nearly as dramatic as our parking nightmare at Grant Village, but it was stressful all the same. About this time a 40' Tiffin arrives to park in A-10. Because we are there, he must pull forward and do a parallel parking maneuver to wiggle around a tree at the front end of his site. When he's finished there is barely enough room to walk between our two coaches. Whoever designed the site layouts at Grant Village and Bay Bridge should be fed to the bears.

Bridge Bay had no cellular service, but we did have open sky for the solar array. Unfortunately, it was overcast for most of our stay here. We spent the next few days exploring the northern Lake region, Hayden Valley and the Canyon region.