The themes of our trip continue – temperature, wind direction and rain predominate. The day out of Lima, had a cold but sunny head wind combined with a loose dirt road. Sunshine and no rain somewhat made up for these.

We went “off-route” from Henry Lake just after we’d left Montana (for the first time) for Idaho. Neither of us could go past Yellowstone National Park (the route doesn’t enter the park), so we did quite a quick road “divert” to West Yellowstone. The journey there was aided by a brisk tail-wind, but not helped by lots of rain. When we got there we met up with Katherine again, having left her at Bigfork (MT). She’d been staying there for 5 days with her man, Dan. Getting into town, continued cold rain (not snow) and the usual mad rush to get things done hit hard.

We’ve developed a habit that we only noticed recently. We don’t pass a shop without walking up and down all the aisles scoping the place out. Usually we find something we could use or want, but mostly we don’t need them yet. This means that towns (places with more than one shop) rapidly lead to meltdown. We both have a little list of things we need, and are always searching for them. My most recent one was 2mm cord. This finally turned up in the climbing shop in Moose (Grand Teton) and I now have some on my bar bag to make opening the top easier and on the ankle gaiter I have on my bicycle boots… We’re noticing that our “needs/wants” are coming to bits of string and the like.

Yellowstone had Bison, Elk, Moose and many, many “RVs”. These are juggernauts of campervans/caravans that sweep all before them. The Grand Prismatic Spring was probably our highlight. The Tetons were mesmerisingly pointy – we all (Katherine had joined us now) were plotting routes up them. They’ve got lots of snow on them, though it melted some lower down while we were there. Sarah and I hope that Maz and Si find some stuff to do when they come through.

Since then I’ve had a queasy stomach and so haven’t been eating much. It doesn’t seem to be turning into anything worrying, but it’s not nice to be off-par, especially with what’s coming up across the Great Basin Desert in Wyoming.