Bequet Confections, creators of caramels with flavors such as Chipotle or Celtic Sea Salt (my two favorite) welcomed our business on Friday morning, before our drive to Yellowstone. What a better way to start a vacation then with a 24 oz bag of caramels.

Though I've been to Yosemite 15-20 times at least, I've never seenYellowstone. It is a beautiful and unusual place. The landscape is many colors and textures. Unlike Yosemite with its trees and granite boulders and magnificent rock cliffs as far as the eye can see, Yellowstone is many different things all in a matter of a hundred yards. You can be looking at a lush green meadow with trees in the background and realize that there is steam blowing gently from a small stream (hot springs) and that the small pond you're looking at isn't just green, but green and blue and orange and is bubbling with a fierceness you haven't seen in your pasta pot. You might even see a mudpot--which is, well, just that--a round pool of grey mud bubbling slowly or quickly with a stench to blow the minds of the spa ladies in Calistoga. Today we visited Dragons Mouth Spring which looks like a cave belching hot water and fumes into a small pool. It looks so much like the cave in Monty Python's Holy Grail that we laughed and expected a killer rabbit to jump out at us. I kept hoping the cave would suddenly belch loudly and spew hot fire, rather than water and steam.

Wildlife: Twice since we've come into the park, the traffic has stopped due to some small herd of bison wandering in the road. It's not like they're darting across the road, like the small animals we're used to in California. Oh no. These guys are, at best, ambling. Okay, maybe I've overstated it. They just seem to wander into the middle of the road and then stop. I keep thinking that they seem surprised that the grass doesn't continue here on the pavement. Their heads are down and they're looking around as if thinking, "where in the world did my plate of grass go?" Instead of lifting their heads up to look and see where they've meandered and to find the lush green meadow on either side of the pavement, they just continue looking down as if the dewy breakfast will somehow magically appear again. Poor things look totally out of place surrounded by two lanes of cars patiently waiting for them to move. And believe me, you can't just squeeze by a half dozen 2000 pound creatures with horns who have (as the rangers have stated many times) a tendency to charge at the most unlikely moments--they DEFINITELY have the right of way.