6-6 (Fri)

After breakfast I went over to reservations to practice for about an hour and a half. Lu, one of the supervisors came in and talked to me. She is the nicest person. I know she will help me in any way she can. I had a question for her about one of the things we are supposed to do. She didn’t know the answer so she said she was going to go ask one of the other supervisors. She came back and said none of them knew! That made me feel a lot better. She said it isn’t anything I will have to worry about.

I walked over to the post office to see if my medicine has arrived. If it has they don’t have it or at least they don’t know where it is.

I got back to my dorm by 11:00 in time to meet Jenny. We took off in her car to go animal spotting and hiking. We wanted to explore before we went to a cowboy cookout at 4:45 at the Roosevelt Lodge.

Along our way we saw three bears and a moose. We also met up with a couple and their 18 year old son from France that are traveling around the world. They shipped their self customized Land Rover in a container from France to Perth, Australia. Then they flew over there and toured around. So far they have been on the road for 10 months. After they did Australia they again shipped the car in a container to LA. They are touring around the western part of the US then will go to Canada and Alaska. Next they will drive down through Mexico and Central America until they get to South America. They will again ship their car to Africa before returning to France. There they are going to drop off their son who is studying to be in the circus (they have his unicycle strapped to the back of the Land Rover) in France and continue on with their travels. If you are interested in seeing any of their pictures especially of what they did to the Land Rover you can go to their website, It’s all in French so you probably won’t be able to read it but you can look. The site is tourdumonde.charlet.free.fr

Jenny and I didn’t get to hike because it started raining. We spent some time in a gift shop instead! It stopped for awhile and we walked down to the Tower Falls which were beautiful.

Tiny cabins at Roosevelt with NO running watwe

By then it was time to head over to the Roosevelt Corrals for our covered wagon ride to the cowboy cookout. This was for employees only. It won’t be open to the public until tomorrow night. Employees from all over the park came. We rode in a covered wagon with the group we work with so I was in with the reservation people. For the public it is $60 a head. It is one of the most popular activities in the park and we all understood because it was so much fun. We took nine wagons out to the cookout site in Pleasant Valley. They had a big fire going and made cowboy coffee over it. There was a singer singing cowboy songs and then we ate steak, baked beans, cold slaw, potato salad, apple crisp and watermelon.

On the way back to the corral we saw two buffalo head butting. They say it really gets rough near Sept when they are ready to mate.

One of the girls from reservations was telling me that that she was charged by an elk today when she came out of the employee dining room. She ran back inside when someone yelled to her to “look out.” They are ready to drop their calves now and aren’t in the best of moods.
Another young girl on our wagon told us she lives in and grew up in Gardiner, 5 miles from the north entrance. Her family hunts and kills all the meat they eat: deer, elk, buffalo and some other kinds. She said in high school they would have to stop the football games many times because buffalo would wander onto the field. They would have to have a time out until security could move them off the field. She also said when a kid got detention the punishment would be to spend an hour shoveling buffalo dung off the football field.

It got really cold when we were at the cookout. Thankfully I was wearing a sweater, my fleece and over all that my Arctic jacket. Plus I had on gloves, earmuffs and a hat.

When I got back to my dorm I stood in a hot shower for a long time trying to warm up.