Grand Teton: Day One
We just spent the last week on vacation at Grand Teton and Yellowstone. It was great, the best vacation ever! Here’s a journal excerpt about our first day:
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Even though he’d only gotten two hours of sleep the night before, Rob stayed up really late last night in the motel in Jackson, watching the original version of True Grit. He was drinking beer and eating corn nuts in bed while I was trying to sleep. Rob hates eating snacks out of bags, so he was being really fussy and fancy as usual and had poured the corn nuts into a plastic cup. He ended up spilling his stupid corn nuts in the bed, of course, at about two in the morning.
“What are you doing?” I asked irritably, with my eyes closed.
“Nothing,” he said sheepishly. “I just spilled a few of my corn nuts.”
He spent the next several hours (it seemed) noisily cleaning them up. I don’t know what time he finally went to bed.
In the morning, at about 6:30 local time, we set out for Grand Teton National Park, which was just a short drive away. As we drove out of Jackson, we stopped at a convenience store and picked out a weird breakfast of pumpkin seeds (for me) and mini doughnuts (for Rob).
We got to the visitors center at Moose pretty early, before it even opened. Rob parked in the parking lot and said in his fussy way, “I thought while you were enjoying your pumpkin seeds, I’d get out my special food items.” And he reached for his mini doughnuts.
The visitors center opened at 8:00, but it was only 7:40.
“What will we do for 20 minutes?” Rob asked as he he opened his doughnuts very daintily.
“Well, it will probably take you 20 minutes to eat your doughnuts,” I said, rolling my eyes. (I’ve known this guy for 20 years. I know what he’s like.)
“What?!” he said, all offended. “It will not! I’m not going to sit here and dine on them!”
I must admit I was wrong. It took him 25 minutes.
We looked around the visitors center and then we went on a little walk through a nearby meadow, the Tetons in the background. The morning light was so beautiful, and the meadow was full of yellow grasses and purple asters and wild rosebushes laden with cherry-like hips. I took lots of pictures, forcing Rob to pose on countless fallen logs.
After our warm-up in the meadow, we took a five-mile hike to Hidden Falls near Jenny Lake. We walked along and had little dumb conversations like this:
Rob: “I love these colorful western grasshoppers. When they open their wings, they look almost like butterflies.”
Leslie: “Ah. Oh, yes, they do. Neat.”
From the trail, we saw a female moose standing in a little pond. We were up high, in the mountains, and down below we could see the little pond sparkling in the sun . . . and the moose standing in it eating soft, sparkling aquatic plants.
We had lunch at Signal Mountain, at the Trapper Grill, which had a cozy lodge-type atmosphere, with a huge stone fireplace, log beams, and a view of the mountains that looked like a painting. We each ordered a chickpea sandwich called The Trailhead (and fries).
Rob was being so funny about the sandwich. “This is a fine sandwich,” he said, “but five minutes in the deep fryer and it would have been outstanding. . . . It’s a little soft. Just saying.”
At about 4:00 we checked into our cabin. We’re staying three nights in a cabin at Colter Bay. It’s perfect! It’s a log cabin! And it is so cozy. There are so many little glowing lamps . . . and there are red-checkered curtains and a braided rug on the floor. There’s a little dresser with a marble top, and an oval mirror with a beveled edge. There’s a wooden desk too, and the bedspreads are really neat, with Indian designs and stripes decorated with rows of canoes and rows of trout and rows of stylized lodgepole pines. Here’s how Rob just described them (the bedspreads): “They look like they’re old-timey, from a kids’ camp. . . . They’re exactly right. They look like they’re from a 1950s dude ranch.”
All the furniture has a wonderful soft, used, scuffed look. It’s real wood and kind of old. And all around the cabins, wild roses and asters and sagebrush and grasses are growing, and the ground is polka-dotted with round rocks, some pink and some gray.
