August 7th Day four in Yellowstone National Park

Our last full day in Yellowstone - here's our lesson learned; You cannot see all of Yellowstone in 5 days / 4 nights. The fact is we barely scratched the surface! We thought about extending our time here but the campgrounds were completely sold out. Oh well, this just means we'll need to come back someday! Anyway, our tour agenda for the day included Norris Geyser Basin, Artist Paint Pots, Fountain Paint Pots and Old Faithful Inn / Old Faithful Geyser. We headed out about 9:30am and were traveling through the Mud Volcano area where we ended up in a huge bison traffic jam. There were bison on the road, bison running down the sides of the road, bison hanging out within Mud Volcano, they were just everywhere! A park ranger in a SUV tried to herd the bison off the road but the bison would not hear of it. It was a good 45 minutes before we could begin to crawl forward passed the giant beasts (and the loads of tourists taking pictures of the bison). We finally arrived at Norris Geyser Basin around 11:00am and we purchased the little guide that describes each of the main thermal features on the trail. It's was a awesome walk on the boardwalk trail. The colors and smells are things we will not soon forget! We saw three of the geysers erupting and the rest we saw and heard bubbling, shooting steam, hissing, burping and roaring. We spent a good deal of time here admiring the thermal features before heading off to our next stop; Artist Paint Pots. The Artist Paint Pots are actually mud pots (boiling mud in a hole in the ground, very cool looking). We saw gray and pink colored mud pots at this stop and I even got sprayed with a bit of boiling mud which hurt! Next we saw Fountain Paint Pots which are the same thing as what we saw at Artist Paint Pots but the colors were red, pink, brown and gray. We stopped at a few more places (a waterfall, more geysers, a roaring mountain side) and then finally arrived at the Old Faithful Inn where we had dinner reservations at 8:15pm. We enjoyed a cocktail on the second floor of the historic inn overlooking the four sided fireplace in the main lobby and when it was time for Old Faithful Geyser to erupt Leon went outside to the boardwalk to watch it while I went to the second floor balcony (it was starting to rain and I didn't feel like getting wet). At 8:15pm we were seated for dinner. Not in the “old house” dining room which I had requested but in the dining room addition that was built back in the 1920s. We both were disappointed with the food, service and the dining room we were seated in. Our “special” dinner ended up being nothing special which is a real shame because the prices for meals in the Old Faithful Inn dining room are very expensive and this was our big spurge for the trip.