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Yellowstone National Park (Part II - South)

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If you haven't read yet the first part of my road trip to Yellowstone , I recommend you go there first, so you can appreciate the whole trip. So, having spent some time on the upper half of the park, I went south, to see some more of the many amazing places that Yellowstone has to offer. That also involved switching hotels: this time I stayed at the Grant Village Hotel, which is next to Yellowstone Lake (yeah, Yellowstone has lakes too - this park has everything). Among many other things, Yellowstone is famous world over for its geysers: two thirds of all the geysers in the world are in this National Park. They are all over the park, and to me the most impressive was the Norris basin. This is a basin in the middle of the park with an enormous concentrations of geysers in a terrain that is constantly changing because of them: there are old geysers, new geysers, big, small, fumaroles (they just let go steam), bubbly mud... It's the closest I've ever seen of a alien landscape ...
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Yellowstone National Park (Part I - North)

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I always loved road trips. That feeling of freedom, just driving away and seeing the views change as you are immersed in them, stopping when you see something curious or interesting or pretty... I know that not everybody likes them, but I love them. And a couple of weeks ago I did a great one: I drove from my house here in Seattle all the way to the Yellowstone National Park, and it was awesome! Yellowstone was the first National Park and to this day it still is one of the largest. It is quite an amazing park, with so much amazing stuff crammed into it, it's hard to know where even to start. And because of that, I decided that it would make sense to split this post in two: in this one, I'll talk about what I saw in the northern half of the park, and on the next one I show what I saw on the southern part. For this part of my trip, I stayed at the Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel, a historic hotel in excellent conditions inside the park itself. It's named after the springs that are ...
Location: Yellowstone National Park, United States
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My First Paddle Rave

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Raves are something pretty common, that most people have heard about. Basically, it is a whole lot of people in a large venue listening to DJs playing electronic dance music and everybody going crazy. I've been to some myself, a number of years ago. But this week I participated for the first time in a new spin on that: a paddle rave! It's quite an interesting idea. In short, you put the DJs on a boat equipped with some powerful speakers and let everybody know that they should show up at a given date and time... in the middle of a lake. Last Wednesday afternoon, one such paddle rave was organized on Lake Union, right in the middle of Seattle. The preferred way to join was with a standup paddle board (hence why "paddle rave") so that you could dance to the music, but there were a few kayaks as well, including my own, and even some small boats. The location of this paddle rave was the waters close to (but not next to) the Gas Works Park. Apparently these raves are becomi...
Location: Lake Union, Seattle, WA, USA
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