Traveling with Ray Owens

I am looking forward to our family trip to Yellowstone starting Saturday morning at the insanely ridiculous time before the dawn cracks. This is due to Delta changing the time for our flight.   We booked a flight for 8:30 and Delta decided we should get up much earlier and leave Kansas City at 6:30.   To quote Frank Sinatra “That’s life”.

Our entire family is taking this trip, this will include Penny and I and our two daughters Amy and Candace and our son’s in-laws Chris and Scott are going as are our grandchildren Logan (13 years old) and Charlotte (10 years old).  Please note I did not give the ages of the adults. (You are welcome.)  Penny, Candace, Amy and I visited Yellowstone in 1988.  See the photos below to estimate their age and if you do not suffer from arithmophobia you might be able to approximate their current ages, but I do not recommend announcing it.

In addition to the 8 of us traveling to Yellowstone from Kansas City we will be joined by our wonderful friends we met when Penny and I went to Logan, Utah some 48 years ago for my PhD studies.  Wes and Lorna Hardin were there in graduate school and we joined the same church.  This was not much of a coincidence because deep in the heart of Mormon country there was really only one non-Mormon congregation in town.   Soon thereafter the Hardin’s and Owens’, along with a few dozen other families started a second congregation, but that story will have to wait for another time.

We were in a small “share group” with Wes and Lorna, along with the Ferguson’s and the Moehlmann’s and others.   We had wonderful times, and those stories will also be for a later time.  Over the intervening years Wes and Lorna have kept in touch on and off. Our career paths took us to many different parts of the country.   Wes worked in museums in various places (including the Henry Ford Museum where Penny and I conned them a couple of years ago in to being our personal guide at the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village).   But his experience that is relevant to our current story is, Wes worked for several summers as a park Ranger at Yellowstone. 

Consequently, Penny and I conned them again into going along with us to Yellowstone and being our personal tour guides. They have already put together spread sheets of day-by-day possible activities including where the flush toilets and vault toilets (AKA outhouses) are located.   It is going to be amazing!   They even penciled in the times when the mother bears will be taking their cubs out for walks. (Oh, that reminds me, I have a bridge for sell if you are in the market.)

My favorite 1988 Yellowstone story is when we had stopped in a parking lot to visit some thermal feature.  As we were walking across the parking lot a large bison came lumbering across the same place we were walking.   Amy and Candace were, naturally, concerned about the encounter.   So, they made a dash toward a conveniently located vault toilet (AKA outhouse) and in they went.   This was in the middle of the summer, and it was hot, and the toilet contents were creating a pungent odor that was soon unbearable.  This created a dilemma with horns upon which my daughters were hung.   They opened the door, and the bison was getting even closer to their location.   So, they took a deep breath and ducked back into the malodorous safety of the toilet.  When the need for fresh air overcame their fear, they opened the door, and the bison was still there.  The back and forth continued until the bison had meandered to a safe distance from our location.  We then made our way to our thermal feature where Candace and Amy encountered a different but still powerful and unpleasant smell of the sulfur.

Safe to say that the whole trip was NOT one big smelly mess.  Yellowstone is incredible.  I am deeply grateful that we are able to take our grandkids to mimic the experience of their mom.

Here we go!

PS The photo at the top was taken by my Great Aunt Vada Hartshorne who was a professional photographer part time and worked at the Western Union office to support this indeavor. It was taken in the late 1950s or early 1960s.