The plan from there was to drive up to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, just south of Grand Teton National Park. This would let us spend Thursday exploring that park, and finishing by driving through Yellowstone to the west entrance where we could spend the night before exploring the rest of Yellowstone. This sounded like a good plan, especially since Jackson Hole had many dozens of hotels, so finding a hotel there wouldn't be a problem. After all, ski season hasn't started, and the summer season is over. This must be low season, right? We drove over the mountains and into Jackson Hole, found ourselves a wireless hotspot outside of a Best Western and began our now familiar search for a hotel. After calling 42 (Yes, forty-two!) hotels, we only found two available rooms in the entire city. One was a smoking room, and the other was $600/night. It's time for plan B.
We started calling hotels in West Yellowstone, where we intended to stay Thursday night. Turns out they were all booked as well (What is going on around here?!?!), but thankfully one of the clerks directed us to a hotel 30 miles or so south of there with rooms available. We immediately called and booked a room at the Anglers Lodge. The only downside was that we now had to drive another 100 miles, backtracking over the mountain before we could sleep. We switched up drivers and headed out, stopping for dinner along the way. Happily, the hotel turned out to be very nice.Since Grand Teton is now going to be far out of our way, the new plan is to tour Yellowstone on Thursday, and decide later on if we'll find another room nearby for a 2nd night in Yellowstone, or if we will push onward towards Cody and Mt. Rushmore.
4 comments:
Matt here. A quick explanation of our situation vis-a-vie Jackson Hole and West Yellowstone. Jackson Hole is 60+ miles south of the south entrance to Yellowstone. West Yellowstone is at the west entrance to Yellowstone. It's ~50 miles from the south entrance to the west entrance of Yellowstone (the park is bigger than the states of Delaware and Rhode Island _combined_), so switching from Jackson Hole to West Yellowstone was a non-trivial problem. Especially when you have to do the switch on 2-lane mountain roads at 7pm at night.
The Prius has proved itself and the hybrid car concept again and again with great gas mileage and comfort throughout the trip. However, the Prius met it's match on the 10% grade that is the road in and out of Jackson Hole. We completely drained the battery and could not get the car to go faster than 40 mph while climbing out of Jackson Hole because the gas engine is not well designed to run the car completely alone and expects some assistance from the battery, this works until you completely drain the battery climbing up really, really steep hills :-).
Seriously, all hotel rooms should be non-smoking.
To Christina: amen.
Will Mike need a new car after all this? He waited forever for this Prius.
Post a Comment