Grand Tetons

Dinner at Orlando’s in Taos Saturday night before we returned on Sunday may have been the highlight of the trip.  There was a full moon rising over the telephone poles as we waited on the patio for a table.  It was cool but comfortable, especially with the little fire they had going there.  On Wednesday we celebrated Joyce’s birthday with dinner at a restaurant called The Bistro, which was in walking distance from the hotel in Jackson.  There we had Kobe beef hamburgers, the cheapest thing on the menu at $21.  Our dinner at Orlando’s was half the price and much tastier.  The Bistro apparently catered to the well-healed crowd visiting Jackson Hole.  Orlando’s is an unpretentious hole in the wall.

We made it to Yellowstone, but only as far as the visitor center near the south entrance.  All roads from there on in the park were closed due to snow from a storm that blew in during our first night in the area.  We tried again the next day but, while there were a few more roads open, the snow having stopped the previous evening, none that led anywhere we wanted to go, that is to say, not places like Old Faithful and other scenic Yellowstone icons. 

We had no trouble with the roads in Grand Teton NP, but, other than the first afternoon there, it was too cold to get out of the car much.  All of this explains why there are no Yellowstone pictures and only a few of the Tetons.  Still, it was really pretty country and worth the trip in spite of the cold, snow and wind. The National Wildlife Art Museum just outside Jackson provided an afternoon’s entertainment indoors.  It has a rock façade and is built into the side of a hill.  I didn’t have high expectations before visiting the museum but it turned out to be a first-class outfit.  The inside was new and well-appointed.  It had obviously been well-funded and the sculptures, paintings and other objets d’art were worth the price of admission. 

On the return home we had planned to retrace our Amarillo-Durango-Rock Springs-Jackson hops but decided on the return to skip Rock Springs, WY, since it is only a few hours from Jackson, and spend the night in Montrose, CO.  From there we headed east, then southeast through Tres Ritos, Mora and Las Vegas, NM to Taos.  It had been nearly 50 years since we were last in Tres Ritos, a place the family used to go camping when I was growing up.  The drive down through there may have been the prettiest of the trip.  On the way to Taos we stopped at La Chiripada Winery where Joyce got a couple of their T-shirts to replace ones she had worn out and I purchased a bottle of wine.  In the 80’s Kari, Jill and I were in that area and stumbled across La Chiripada.  We’ve been back several times since.

We covered over 3,000 miles on the trip but the Pathfinder did its job without complaint, even when a couple of hundred pounds of ice collected on the undercarriage from the snow in Yellowstone, which did not completely melt and fall off until sometime after we left Jackson.  We had the back floorboard well-larded with road munchies and stopped only for gas and restroom breaks at McDonalds and fortifying ourselves with caramel frappes.