Big waterfall that should have a name...

At the end of our massive tour through Yellowstone we saw a sign for the 'Grand Canyon of Yellowstone'. So how could we not stop.

Well, the kids were a bit put off. They were getting beat tired and the sun was intense. By this time we had been in the van rocketing around the park for 7 hours and we were nearing the end.

We had a pretty intense discussion and debate in the parking lot before we even got out. In the end we went to see the water fall and the kids guaranteed ice cream after supper.

The walk to the north lookout was a short 10 minutes and it was worth it. The sound of the falls as we were getting close was getting most of us excited (there was one lone hold out in the parking lot negotiations who would not relent bit in the end got thrown under the bus by the other two and was royally pissed at all four of us!).

The waterfall was so neat. Our youngest had buckets of questions about the water, swimming in the waterfall, if we could jump down, etc.

So beautiful it made me wet my pants in life ending fear.

But for me it was overshadowed by the lookout being perched over a billion foot drop to the rocky, stabby, bone mushing canyon below.

This is pretty much how most of our stops go. We sell the stop and explain how amazing it will be. But as the day goes on we sometimes lose some credibility and it get harder and harder to get them out of the van.

But we would have it no other way.

Dragon's Cave

When we stopped at the top of Beartooth Pass a couple days ago a nice couple from Swift Current told us about this place called Mud Volcano.

So of course we had to find it and go to a place called Mud Volcano!

Mud Volcano - lots of mud, not a lot of volcano.

The volcano part was super neat (and very stinky!) But I think the absolute best part was at the end called the Dragon's Cave.

It was a big cave that had a steam streaming out the top. That alone would male it look lile a dragon was a sleep inside, but...

It also had water that was slooshing around the entrance, mixing the slooshing water with the gas escaping the cave creates this growl that comes from deep within. So fantastico!!!

Dragon's Cave - the water sloshing and lapping on the edge made the cave deadly.

Old Faithful

Oooooold Faithful! Always there for you, every 92 minutes.

Old faithful was cool. It shot water 300 ft in the air. When it went in the air it turned I to steam.

On my way out of Old Faithful I bought a miners helmut with a big light.

~ Ranger Mitch

The elk moved into town

The first town inside of Yellowstone was Mammoth Hot Springs. A beautiful little place with sackfuls of history and giant steaming pools and terraces. On the way in there is a large boulevard with lots of grass and trees.

This morning it was invaded by many elk. They were curled up and sleeping all over tha damn place. The kids loved seeing them so upclose.

On our way back out of the park most of the boulevard was blocked off by park rangers because the elk had not moved on yet. There were close to 50 mom and baby elk taking naps and feeding, bloody cool!

Elk everywhere.

Today was Yellowstone day!

We drove away from the hotel this morning at 6:20 am with the plan to see Yellowstone National Park.

We will have additional posts later to point out all the things we saw, which we wouldn't have seen if it wasn't for Ranger Mitch.

We found this amazing Junior Ranger vest at Old Faithful this morning. By the time we reached our next stop he had filled the pouches with bandaids, an emergency dollar bill, and other ranger safety items.

He left room in the vest pouches for a pocket knife and a smallish hammer for smashing rocks. We will always be safe with him in our van.

Cookie anyone?

We were driving and we got hungry, so we stopped at a little bakery.

We were expecting little muffins and little cookies.

But instead we found that they make only HUGE cookies!

So dad let us get big cookies. They were very tasty, because they were made with different kinds of chocolate chips.

Delicious!

~ Little Nat

Snow ball fight in July anyone?

Here is the short story of today (the long version later), at the top a mountain we came across a massive snow bank....so we stopped to take pictures and have a snow ball fight of course.

Cold feet
Great views
Snow balls in the crotch
Meeting a couple from Swift Current
Shortness of breath
Temperature drop of 15 degrees in an hour

So much fun!

Pictograph State Park

One of the first things we came across when looking for things to do in Billings was visiting the Pictograph State Park.

Because it had been blistering hot the few days before we decided to hit the park up first thing in the morning. We pulled in at just after 8:00 in the morning and it was already 21 degrees.

The best part was that since it was so early no one was there, so we paid our park admission and headed up on the short 2 km walk around the park.

It was a bit steep at part so that made the calls of "uppy daddy?" happen more and more frequent.

The our oldest read a sign 'Danger rock fall area, beware' she started to become a bit twitchy.

When we were almost at the first cave she read the next sigh 'Watch for rattlesnakes', which wasn't complete without a large picture of a coiled up rattlesnake!

Welllllll, the hike was a bit more interesting after that.

"Uppy daddy?", "I don't like snakes!!!!", "Uppy daddy?", "Hey kids look at those cave paintings.", "If I saw a snake a would throw him down the hill!", "I DON'T LIKE SNAKES, CAN WE GO HOME!", "Uppy mommy?"

You would think that would be enough to make this hike epic in every sense of the word, but on our way to the last cave, called Ghost Cave of course, the park ranger fella walked up and said;

"You all should keep your kids close I just just pulled a rattler off the path down there."

As he said this he held up his long snake grabber and opened and close the grabber part over and over again.

Now Mom and I were getting a bit worried, bit what the hell we couldn't shreak and run like hell. So we conintued on with the kids in the middle and both of us booked ending the hiking party.

At the bottom in the interpretive centre reading about the caves, the excavations, and the people that lived there between 200 and 9000 years before modern times was really amazing.

Next we might wait a bit later in the day when there were more people around and the rangers had already completed their rattler clearing duties.

Lake Elmo, Is it red?

After we risked our lives hiking the Pictograph State Park we drove to another state park, Lake Elmo.

Our youngest asked if the lake was red, boy was he disappointed when we said no.

"Awwwwww."

We were not planning on swimming in the lake, we hoped to play on the awesome play structure and dip our toes in the water.

Buuuuuut it didn't work out that way. We stripped off most of the boys clothes and let all three of them go bananas. We packed up to go at about 11:00 and the van said it was 31 degrees out. So it was a perfect time and tempurature to swim.

We thought that they would have their swimming itch scratched, except after lunch they rocked the hotel pool for a good hour more.

I think they would swim any opportunity we give them.

Today it was 36 degress outside, so we hit the pools hard!

Today we accumulated just under 5 1/2 hours in the water today.

We started with our continental breakfast at 6:00 and the 1 hour and 45 minutes in the hotel pool. After lunch at Candy Town we spent 2 hours and 30 minutes at the local waterpark (The Reef). And finished it all off with another 1 hour and 45 minutes after supper at the Olive Garden (mmmm breadsticks!) in the hotel again.

The kids de-brinded in the bath tub for a good 30 to 40 minutes while Mom and I nursed our pool headaches. Solid day!

Candy Town for supper? *#@! Yeah!

We stopped at a store in a strip mall (thanks to a giant billboard on the highway) called Candy Town.

Yes it was lunch time and yes we ate candy and drank olde time sodas and milkshakes for lunch.

That is what summer vacation is all about.

Octonauts!

"Ummm, I like octonauts!" Was the response of our youngest when asked about his new Octonauts toys.

Octonauts is a strange little Canadian kids show and we have only been able to find the toys in the U.S.

"I like that show and play with them."

"Octonauts go in da water, and them house underwater. And umm, them house called Octopod."

"Kwazii and Captain is my favourite, and Shellington."

"Umm, in the bath I play with them."

First post from our 3 year old.

UPDATE: It is currently 10:06 p.m. and he is still playing with the new Octonauts toys, damn you to hell Octonauts!!!

Present for Grandma

Found the perfect present for Grandma in Sydney, MT.

It was a bugger to strap to the roof, but so worth it!

First pee stop - Culbertson, Montana

Just past the border, over the rolling hills of Montana we came across a lovely (and extremely necessary) bathroom.

And it had a park beside it. Hot damn!

Will the android app work?

Let's see if the android squarespace app will work.

LOADING......

...........ANALYZING.

Ding! it works. My lovely confused face posted from my Samsung Note  II is the proof. 

All my ideas seems soooo glorious before the follow through

It all began during one of the many trips to the store to buy the weekly allotment of food for the family. I was tasked with a list that was by no means long but was difficult to execute, such as kids cereal (the kind they want or the kind I want them to want), and yogurt (again, so many damn options, and flavours, and delivery methods of yogurt I was doomed to get the wrong kind), I believe I bought the wee little kids cups when I was supposed to get the tubes!

Anyways, before I actually got bogged down in all those damn choices I came across a large box near the end of fruit and veggies. It was full of 4 to 5 foot lengths of brown-ugly-bamboo-looking things. I almost walked right by with a smirk that everyone would have read as "Ha! no one wants to buy a 4 foot piece of creepy bamboo. Am I right?", but my eye caught the label as I passed by.

"Raw Sugar Cane - $1.98"

Well holy crap I stopped in my tracks and pulled the nicest piece of raw sugar cane I had ever seen (it was also the first piece I had ever seen) out of that box and strutted away with an amazing coolness and unconcerned look of "Oh this, I buy raw sugar cane all the time, I feed my 27 year old box turtle* Gorki and then transform the rest of the stalk into a crude flute that I use to express my worldly angst with."

* I really don't think you should ever feed sugar cane to a turtle, it just seems like something someone else would do.

Though I am sure that in those 30 seconds I went from smug smirk to excited as hell and then to cool calm I looked like an idiot that buys something without knowing what he is going to do with it.

..........sigh

See, I have not idea what to do with this thing.The drive home I envisioned the family being excited to see thing new 'food' and rally around plans to consume it in what ever ways we saw fit. Instead all I got was my oldest boy grabbing it shouting "COOL!" and taking a swing at the cupboards with it, resulting in a loud crack. Boy did he look sheepish until we saw that no damage was done to the cupboard door.

Mom asked, "So what do we do with it?". To which I replied "Eat it!"

Well that was the end of that conversation and she wandered off.

I heard her shortly after share a laugh with our daughter when she said "Dad is going to eat a branch for supper."

After a few quick minutes on the Google and I had a whole list of ideas to utilize my length of sugar cane for.

• Soup
• Chew it
• Cook with it
• Kebob skewers
• Tea sweetener
• Boil down in to a natural sweetener
• Coffee stir stick and sweetener (seems like the coolest idea ev-er!)
• Fruit kabobs

...and the list goes on.

I then got out the cutting board, my biggest knife, and a wee paring knife. The directions I found said to cut the cane as close to the knuckles or joints and then peel the hard exterior to get the sweet juicy sugar cane.

Well it was like cutting a piece of 2x2! I had to slam the palm of my hand on the back of the butchers knife over and over and over to get the damn thing to cut. 

So I chopped and swore, and peeled and chopped, and worked so damn hard to turn this stick into nice pieces of soft sugar cane. 

The pictures online made it look so much easier!So with my tiny pile of yummy sugar cane I approached the family for a taste. The one site said to chew the sugar cane and suck all the sweet juice out and then spit the pulp out afterwards. So I thought the kids would be excited to chew some natural sugar.

......sigh

I only convinced the middle guy to give it a try. And after he spit out the pulp he said "This is the best thing I have ever had before in my whole life Dad!". So I offered him as many as he wanted because it would be just him and I, he said "No thanks." and walked away. 

I ended up trying a few different recipes with the sugar cane and not a one of them really worked out. Oh well, at least I have a two foot piece of sugar cane in the pantry and a deep tissue bruise on my palm to remind me of what it could have been. I can still recollect a faint image of the family sitting around, tlaking and laughing while chewing on the fresh raw sugar cane and drinking some home made iced tea lightly sweetened by nature.

I don't think I will ever learn my lesson, because  on Monday I bought a giant can of Gulab Jamun. I plan on cracking it open tonight, when Mom is at her university class, and subjecting the kids to this yummy hot sweet dessert. Deep fried dough balls soaked in sweet syrup, they should just give up and get used to me forcing new strange foods on them, because I don't plan on stopping.

Best way to finish off a fantastic Indian buffet!

Kids pancake cutters

We have been working hard on the pitch and now we are ready to present our idea to the Dragons Den.

Get ready Canada for the soon to be patented product, the Kids Pancake Cutter!

Some of you may mistake this technological wizardry as a pizza cutter but you would be ass wrong.

This is a pancake cutter, and it only cuts pancakes. To some it may seem like a trivial kitchen utensil to have but when you are continuously trying to keep pancakes on hungry kids plates cutting pancakes manually with a fork and knife is an absolute waste of time.

With the pancake cutter you can hand over the cutting duties to your kids! And with all the free time you can lean on the kitchen counter while a fresh batch are cooking away and watch your kids make a horrible sticky buttery syrupy evil mess!!!!

Pancakes sure taste good but I hate the stickiness they create, the devil's breakfast of choice. I touched syrup on the bottom of my little one's plate and almost threw up...

Tis' the best time of the year....summer holiday planning time of the year.

We don't usually take the 'traditional' Canadian path to surviving winter by going somewhere warm in the cool darkness of our winter. Instead we  squint REALLY hard and imagine summer. Try to imagine that we are on summer vacation and try to imagine what we are going to do. 

That is our million dollar question.

This year we have taken the various requests from the three hosers of, mountains again, camping, waterslides, ice cream, bigger waterslides, a volcano, elmos house, and stay home....and turned it into a trip to Montana and Idaho to see Yellowstone National Park. 

So we are now researching and requesting tourist guides and searching out cool hotels, hoping to string together a cool 10-14 day van ride to see Old Faithful. 

As well find cool places and interesting spots to visit we will let you all know.

Oh and we are also finalizing our Christmas 2013 trip. I don't want to spoil the surprise but here is the hint.

We are flying to a warm place to get a large vessel populated by imaginary characters full of alliteration.

. 

.

. 

.

.

still guessing? 

Good ole outdoor winter cooking!

So before we get into the winter cooking I want to go back 6 months to whne a friend stumbled upon a great little outdoor wooden stove online. We both think that we could sruvive for weeks in the forrest with just our wits and a hatchet, so this stove was like candy to us.

Stovetec sells numerous stoves and such but we were fixated on the 2 door recreational stove. We talked big and made palns but our pizazz petered off and we forgot about it. Then one faithful day in November last year he email ed me and said "I am getting myself one for Christmas! Do you want one?". 

"Yes please!!! You are getting the one with two doors right?" I asked. A few shortly weeks later we were in possesion of out new beautiful mean green wood burning stoves. 

NOw fast forward to last weekend when we were lookign at my daughters Brownies book to see what Brownie badge she would like to try for this month. And we fell upon the Outdoor Cookout badge. Now my mind opened up and shot straight to the Stovetec stove that had beenin the garage for a few weeks now and had not been used, and that was it!

Our daughter wrote a list of the materials she would need and proceeded to gather them up and get ready.

we are now ready to cook in the snow!

So the oldest attempting to earn a badge was in chage of the whoel endeavour, and I was the safety officer. Most of my conversations ended with "...and then you will burn the house down."

After she cleared a spot on the deck (don't worry a good 1.5 feet from teh house) and placed a board to hold everything we all got excited to light the stove and get a water-boiling-on!

burn baby burn! and once hte fire was lit and hte bottom door closed the flames dropped and the heat roared.And then we had to wait, which seemed to take forever, for about 10 minutes until the water began to roll and boil. 

Only the hardiest of outdoor winter chefs sit on a purple IKEA chair.

The stove does have an adjustable sleeve, that you can see surrounding hte pot of water, that focuses the heat onto the pot or pan used to cook with, the tiny pot we used had a low handle which would not allow us to tighten the sleeve snuggly to the pot. So I would guess that with a tight fit on the pot it would have reduced te boiling time by a few minutes.

Well with the macaroni in thewater and steam rising all over the palce we were one excited bunch. And htat made me.....beside myself with pleasure!!! I hoped they would enjoy this, and I hoped even more that this would actually work. And I was pretty proud of myself when she had a huge smile stirring the macaroni.

the miners came out hte hills that afternoon. Drawn by the smell of the famous Elbow Noodles a la Torgerson. Their fascination with the stove was first, second was watching the wooden spoon steam after stirring the noodles.

After we successfully cooked a wee pot of noodles we went on to thfe best food eveer...boiled weiners. YUM!

THe middle guy was sooo excited to stir the hot dogs and talk almost not stop in the 5 minutes it took to 'cook' them, about camping, cooking,  fire, pots, wood, fire again, steam, spoons, steaming spoons, and how he could cook all our suppers like this, even tea!

"...the water we would get from a stream that was by the tent. And then I would cook supper with it, and wash dishes in it, and then we would build a bridge over the stream so we could play soccer in the field on the other side...."It was a lot of fun and the weather made it absolutly awesome. The amazing thing about the stove that I haven't mentioned was that all we used was 4 short pieces of wood, maybe an inch around and 10 inces long, to cook the noodles nad the hot dogs. 

So it would even come in handy when the zombies come and you don't want to be out with the hordes gathering armfuls of wood for every meal.

home again home again jigging jig

Well it has been a day since our last update. Here are the highlights and lowlights of these past few hours.

Highlight

We changed our course in Canmore and instead of going toCalgary we detoured to Edmonton.

In Edmonton we stopped off and said hi to bestest friends of ours, and their super adorable new baby gal. It was well worth the detour just to see them!

After our baby fix we waited in line at the West Edmonton Mall watermark first thing in the morning. It opened at 10:00 and after a short one hour lunch break at Moxies we went Dad and the two oldest went back and swam until 4:30. And Mom and the wee dude walked, napped, and shopped.

And of course we IKEAed the hell out of IKEA! We bought some cool toy storage for the basement and filled that van up more than it should be.

Lowlight

We ran out of our special coffee and have been tweaking a bit. And this morning forgot entirely to make coffee in the room so we went caffeine free until supper time!!!

Hello headache!

Our hotel in Edmonton has a few short comings. A bit dated and musty smelling, the bunk beds in the kids side room is rickety and mildly dangerous, and the 'terrace' is creepy and has a one foot high railing that wouldn't hold a infant in.

Vacation is......over.

Tomorrow morning we are packing ourselves into an overfill van and drifting Eastward home. We hope to be home at a decent hour, 3:00, so we can unpack and get a few groceries and such.

Oh well, it had to end some day as we did not win the lottery while on vacation.

Woot!