Day Seventeen: I begin to realize I might be crazy

Denver, CO to West Yellowstone, MT

9 am to 10 pm

(Yes, I realize that this drive should have taken us a mere 11 hours tops, but this was the craziest day of travel by far.)

Some of the day's highlights:

• Got pulled over coming into Wyoming.  Somehow managed to look pitiful enough to forego the speeding ticket I deserved.
• Was distracted for the remainder of the Cheyenne outskirts, and didn't realize I needed gas until I was too far to go back to Cheyenne.
• Ended up in a little town called Chugwater that doesn't have a gas station anymore (you can find out why here.)
• Was sent to the home of a lady named Belinda who sold me at least 3 gallons of gas for $5 (again, I must have looked pretty pitiful with my car full of kids--I was beginning to look quite bedraggled by this point in the day).
• Drove and drove and drove across Wyoming.
• Realized it was a stupid thing to have ever even mentioned the existence of a place called "Yellowstone" to the kids, and that maybe we were setting our sights just a tad high on this one.
• Reached the East park entrance as the sun was going down.
• Saw some bison, took a couple pictures, and mostly just drove across Yellowstone in the dark (oh yeah, and almost hit two huge bison that were standing in the middle of the road just around a curve).
• Collapsed into our beds in West Yellowstone.

Ps. Please don't judge my parenting based on the apparent mental instability of those pictured here.