Days 7-8 Grand Teton
We arrived at our campsite around lunchtime and were *very* pleased with the views behind our site (I highly recommend Site 48 at Signal Mountain!). I put Joshua down for a nap while everyone else walked down to Jackson Lake and then we had some lunch at our site. We then headed up to the Colter Bay Visitor Center and did a short hike. We headed back to our site to make and eat dinner before attending a ranger program about bears.
The highlight for me was getting to experience the sunset behind the Tetons. It was so beautiful and we surprised the boys with a blowup boat. The water was warmer than expected - nothing like the small glacial lakes in the Rocky Mountains in which we had dipped our fingers and toes. The scene was absolutely gorgeous and they looked adorable in their little boat with the incredible backdrop of the sunset over the mountains, but the reality of having kids means accepting the fact that even in that breathtaking beauty, they’re going to argue about whose turn it is to paddle the boat and you may need to threaten future boat experiences to get them to stop yelling at one another. When you look at pictures of someone’s vacation, it might look absolutely perfect and unattainable. Some might feel intimidated that they’re family could never do that or may feel like a failure when things break down and their kids are being brats on an amazing trip, but the truth is, if we avoid experiences out of fear of imperfection, we don’t gain anything. I’m willing to yell at my kids as they argue over the oars during a beautiful Teton sunset if it means we all get to have a moment of awe during a beautiful Teton sunset. I can wish my kids were perfect- and maybe some people’s kids are, which is awesome, but I don’t want to put the adventures on pause until they’re grown because seeing them sit silently staring at the view before them for even just a second is absolutely incredible and worth all the trouble.
Speaking of trouble… sometimes “joyful family travel” includes “some day this will be a funny story” times, especially when two year olds are involved. Admittedly, many negative experiences can be avoided with better planning, but even a planner like me sometimes doesn’t think about things like “my kids should probably shower at the RV park where the bathroom is free and really nice,” and instead we decide last minute to shower at our Teton campground the next night realizing at Yellowstone we won’t have showers or a water hookup. We have one child who hates showers and has just taken baths for the past 6 months (including in Chicago). Our camper has a tub, so it’s also possible there, but we had a mostly empty tank and wanted to get everyone done together. The showers were private rooms and we had gotten 10 tokens (which was about 10 minutes) planning to split up, but you have to use at least 6 tokens, so then we realized we all needed to go together. The bathroom was gross- but typical campground gross with a really wet floor (with about ½” of dirty water). As we got in and started getting our bigger boys ready to hop in the shower, our toddler did what todders do best and grabbed all the towels and threw them onto the wet floor- immediately soaking them with nasty water. One had been hung on a hook and escaped his grabby hands, but the others now were heavily saturated in liquid that made me cringe. Then, our son who hates showers allowed himself to be soaped up outside of the shower, but screamed while in it and dropped his bathing suit into the nasty water. Oh well- that’s life! We got ‘em all showered within the 6 minutes and the other 4 tokens now would go toward laundry. Our shower-hating boy wore one of Ryan’s shirts like a dress and we headed back to our campsite a little less stinky. I had stayed up until about midnight doing all of our laundry the night before at the RV park, and now Ryan took a late-night laundry turn (of course neither of us sleeping until the other was back). While it still makes my skin crawl when I think about carrying those soaked towels to the laundry area, I can already chuckle about our mishaps.
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