4th of July Weekend

So we had a 3 day weekend over the 4th of July and it was so much fun! The first activity was the Rexburg 4th of July parade that TJ marched in. He was so good! Julia sat out in the sun all by herself waiting for him....and he finally came!!



As you can see, Julia has some pretty mad camera skills. Anyway, after the parade was over, we met up with our friends Kate and Jeff and headed to Idaho Falls to watch the fireworks and BBQ. Granted, this was at about 4 in the afternoon so we only had to wait about 6 hours for the fireworks, but we kept ourselves pretty entertained. We played some games, taught Jeff and Kate the amazing card game called Hand and Foot, ate some amazing stake (after the Men assembled our new high-tech $10 grill), and had a riveting watermelon seed spitting contest.



Julia doesn't like watermelon, but she still got to be in one of the pictures

On Saturday, TJ had to practice for a little while, but after he was done, we left for Yellowstone! It was TJ's first time! Our goal was to see a bear. We'll see if that happened....
It didn't take us very long to see wildlife. We saw TONS of bison and elk. After stopping to take pictures a few times, we stopped to go on a little hike. Even though it was only 5 miles roundtrip, we were both pretty tired by the time we got to our destination of Fairy Falls. It was pretty and we had fun speculating why it was named Fairy Falls. Did a fairy discover it? Is it whimpy and so people rudely called it Fairy Falls? Is it so small that it's only a waterfall to a fairy? These were just a few of our brilliant ideas. Probably the most exciting thing about Fairy falls, however, was the yellow bellied marmot! It was a friendly little guy and came pretty close to us. We named him Fred.


On the return trip, we had some fun fighting off gnats. TJ's head ended up with little red dots all over it :( Julia's probably did too, but they were a little harder to see.
Next we headed to Old Faithful. We didn't feel like waiting around for it to errupt, so we left a little dissapointed. We did, however, sight some awesome hippies. They all had dreadlocks (even the 10-year-old daughter) and TJ was pretty grossed out by the never-been-shaved legs the females were sporting.
We stopped a few more times to take pictures and then headed out of Yellowstone into Teton National Park. We saw more bison and elk and had a beautiful view of the Teton mountains. The most exciting part, however, was our sighting of none other than a BEAR. It was pretty much amazing. There were two of them and when we both got out of the car to try and get a good look at them, one started crossing the road in front of us and we were told very firmly to get back in our car by the ranger. TJ was more than happy to comply.

We saw some more animals after that, including a bison pooping, but unfortunately it was to dark and none of the pictures or videos turned out very well. All in all, I'd say it was a pretty good trip!