Day XII - The Drive to Yellowstone, Idaho Falls & The Greatest SuperBowl of All Time

Since the weather looked pretty normal outside when we woke up, we decided to call up Hertz to see if it might be possible to cancel out of our 4WD SUV and just into a normal car (the SUV was about $200/day while a normal car was about $20/day).  They said it would be totally fine, so instead of impulsively doing it, we decided to call the West Yellowstone Tourism Center to find out if the weather was similar up there.  It wasn't.  He sounded like he was about to be swept away by the wind INSIDE the center, told us there was about 5" of snow that just fell and another 5" supposed to come down tonight.

We decided we better stick with the SUV for today.  We got an Uber to the Hertz at the airport (not sure why the Amtrak Hertz was located at the airport, but whatever).  After picking up our new car, ( Thanks rental car honefund givers! You guys are awesome! ) we did the mandatory rental car naming ceremony.

It would be known, of course, as "Bison Bison".

We got on our way for our first driving of the trip!  As we left Salt Lake City we saw.... you guessed it!  A Great Salt Lake!  It was pretty ridiculously large.  We stopped by the first gas station we saw to pick up some mandatory road trip beef jerky and sunglasses because my lord the glarey glariness and then we were on our way!

Perhaps not surprisingly, Conor's sunglasses turned out to be kinda crap :( Luckily, Ryan did the very husbandly thing of not taking his back after she stole them to wear instead. Yay Husbands!

As we started up north we could see the weather change before our eyes.  We hit the Idaho Stateline and noticed that the road had snow building up on the sides now.  Then it started getting actually actually snowy, and we started to fall in love with Idaho.  We stopped by a quick rest stop for another snowball fight (duh) and to check out some of the things Idaho Tourism has to offer.  The Potato Museum & Idaho Falls seemed to be the big ones of interest to us.  We weren't sure we would have time for them, but if we did it would be cool!  We saw another one, Bear World, which looked about as amazing as it sounds, but unfortunately it was closed for the Winter, because, well, dumb/actually smart hibernation!

We made our way to Idaho Falls and took a quick stop there to check out the actual falls.  It was pretty cool, almost the entire thing was frozen and there was snow everywhere!  It was definitely starting to get cold.

As we started getting closer to West Yellowstone and Montana, we noticed that service stations and cell service got fewer and farther between, but at the same time, snow and beauty grew immensely.

We pulled up into West Yellowstone, Montana, and after drifting around in the snow a bit we decided to check into our hotel.  We looked out our window and noticed HUGE icicles hanging off of our roof.  Nearly 6 feet long!  We had a quick drink at our hotel while watching the SuperBowl Half Time and then we went off to downtown West Yellowstone to see if we could find a good place to watch the rest of the game.

We were a little bummed, we had tried to make good time so that we could watch the SuperBowl (without missing anything on the way obviously) and by the time we got to the bar the score was already 21-3 with the Falcons winning.  Since we knew the game was basically already over, we just decided to grab a beer and hang out there with some of the locals.

Well, if you watched the game this year, you would know, it was anything but over.  We watched the most ridiculous comeback in (potentially) sports history in the middle of a snowy packed Montana bar at West Yellowstone and it was incredible!  People were DEFINITELY into it!

After the game, it was pretty late so we tried to figure out where we should grab a bite to eat.  Well, apparently West Yellowstone wasn't a big late-night-food sort of city and we ended up romantically eating vending machine dinner for two while listening to the wolves in at the sanctuary next door. Pretty sweet.