We are back in contact with the world. At this moment, we are making an afternoon camp in the parking lot of the Menor Historical Site, just 1/2 mile north of Moose, in the Grand Tetons National Park. The mountains are looming to our west, just out the dinette window where I am sitting catching up on work.

The past four days have been great, and there's much to tell. I will try to backfill some blog entries tonight and tomorrow. In short:

1) I took over 500 photos, of which some are now in our Flickr album.

2) Yellowstone was crowded and, although a terrific place to visit, will not be on our top ten list of national parks we most like to go. Yes, we saw geysers, bison, pronghorns, and many other creatures. The park is so big (size of Connecticut) that we were only able to see a tiny fraction in three nights. But in that short time we managed to get caught in a couple of huge traffic jams, the parking lots were all overflowing, and even the 7 a.m. ranger walk was attended by over 50 people. We got up every day at 5:30 to beat the crowds, and it was a drag to find full parking lots everywhere by 8 a.m. If we come back, it will be in the off-season.

3) My Mac's internal hard drive died on Friday, but fortunately I had a full backup made on July 4, and I had enough warning of the problem to save most of the intervening work as well. It's now completely un-bootable, but I am fine, working off Eleanor's laptop with all my data on the external backup drive. However, I was not able to retrieve about 100 great photos from Glacier National Park before the main drive died. I still hope to do that when we reach a service center in Denver. Have you remembered to backup your data lately?

4) Jackson WY campgrounds are incredibly expensive ($52 per night with Good Sam discount) so we are going to head to Idaho today to get cheaper camping in Victor.

5) We managed to run over a 1" drywall screw in a campground in Grand Tetons, which meant an emergency trip to the service center in the park. The tire is unrepairable, so we are on the spare at the moment. How did a drywall screw end up in the center of a huge National Park?

[Hmmm... re-reading the above I can see where it might seem like we had the Trip From Hell. I should reassure you, in spite of the minor annoyances we really did have a good time. I'll detail the hikes and highlights in the backfilled blog entries later. I think if you take anything away from what I've just outlined, it is that backup plans and flexibility are the keys to success.]

6) We found Rich C today and had lunch with him here in Grand Teton. He's off to the campground now, and we'll meet up again with him tonight. Right now, I'm catching up on work since I finally have cell phone and Internet again, Emma is watching a cartoon on my iPod, and Eleanor is sleeping ... she suddenly started not feeling well after lunch. Hopefully we'll be on the road again for the short drive to Victor ID in an hour or two.