Okay so I believe the last part I left off we were in Oregon and had spent a couple days in Washington. From there we took off east and were heading to Yellowstone! We spent a good five nights in Yellowstone and during my time there we talked to random people we encountered. People we saw while touring the geysers, such as Ole Faithful and different waterfalls/viewpoints. This might be a surprise to you but there was quite a lot of people from different countries that come to Yellowstone since it is the oldest national park in the US being established all the way back 1872 and it is actually the second oldest national park in the whole world, who knew! Basically this means that we weren’t able to talk to everybody we ran into since a good amount of people spoke a wide variety of languages. Although we did run into a good bit of people that spoke English, thankful the UK and Australia speak English haha. It was great being able to talk to people outside of the states. We met two Australian guys who were there for a couple days and were actually staying at a neighboring campground. They told us how Australian’s are actually quite environmentally conscious in the fact they hardly ever have plastic bags at grocery stores and even were quite pissed that the RV’s parked next to them were running their engines and polluting the surrounding area around them. The only state that could compare to Australia is California, environmentally that is. Anyhow it was really cool seeing their perspective on things and learning that over the past 40 years or so that the Aussie population has nearly doubled. The last day we were there went around the neighboring campgrounds and invited people to come over for some smores and worship. Some of them ended up coming by that night. We had probably a dozen people outside of our team over. We started the night off with songs and smores while ending with different stories. The next day we were heading to Colorado and had planned to stay in the Tetons which is near the Idaho mountains. We had no definite plans on where we were going to camp and had just planned on showing up to a campground early and hoping they had some open sites. A huge blessing came out of that night as a couple who ended up coming shared with us that they had a cabin just outside the Tetons and opened up the home for both of our teams to stay there a night on our journey to Colorado. This was a huge relief for everybody just knowing we had a set place to stay the next night. We showed up the next night and the cabin was better than we could have imagined and had great view of the mountains off the back porch. There was plenty of room for all of us to fit comfortably in the cabin allowing us to not have to set up and break down tents the next morning, saving us all time. It was actually a friend of the guy who was also staying theres birthday. We had a nice time celebrating with them, sharing stories and playing games that night. The next morning we took off for the 8 hour drive to complete the trip to Berthoud, Colorado. We met the family we would be staying with the next week and found out that they had previously been opening up their house for couch surfers so it was yet another blessing for them to open up their home since they weren’t alumni parents of a previous racers like most of the homes we have stayed with in the past. The time here has been quite nice as we are finishing up our last day here as I write this blog. We were able to go into Denver and explore the city two different day seeing a wide range of food trucks and talking to various homeless people we came across. It’s sad that we are leaving tomorrow but our next stop is in Woodland Park, Colorado so I’m excited to meet our new host. Thanks for looking over my blog and as always feel free to reach out or comment any questions you have. Until next time everybody stay safe.
