I thought we were in good shape with our packing for this trip, having only the gloves and socks left to pack Wednesday night, but all our other chores kept us up until 11:30. After only 3 hours of sleep, we were on the road by 3:30 a.m. About 5 minutes from the house, Lew was talking about skiing Upper Terrace drive and I thought, if it snows, it’s great to have our Aussie hats to keep snow off our glasses. OH NO, the Aussie hats! I meant to grab them and put them at the top of one of the duffle bags. Lew said, “Well, we will just have to do without them this time.” Nope, NOT AN OPTION! He quickly realized his error, turned around, and headed back to the house. Fortunately, the hats were where they belonged, so I grabbed them and we quickly got on the way again. Only 15 minutes lost, but we were cutting it close for the airport. It was cold and clear, with the near full moon shining brightly, so we wouldn’t have any weather delays at Harrisburg. It turned out we had plenty of time, since the security screening didn’t open until 5 a.m.

Security this time went very smoothly. It should, seeing that they now have about 40 – 50 security workers, where before they had less than 10. Harrisburg had no room in their baggage handling area for the explosives detection machines, so they put them in the lobby. They set up two swab machines at each airline’s check-in area and two of the huge tunnel x-rays right inside the front doors of the terminals. They had to close two of the entrances to accommodate the machines. This setup forces a lot of manual handling of the bags. You put your bags on the scale, the clerk tags them for their destination, and then a security guard takes the bags over to a swab machine. Once they are processed there, the guard takes them back to the scale and the airline clerk moves them to the conveyor. Random bags are selected to be processed through the x-ray machine, again with manual transport. Harrisburg is in the process of building a new terminal that will hopefully take the new requirements into account. We breezed through the gate screening, where the screeners were very professional, polite, and helpful, a wonderful change.

Our flight to Cincinnati was uneventful, but it was snowing when we landed. The plane seemed to sideslip a little bit before the pilot got it under control. The snow was pretty heavy, so we were concerned about our flight to Salt Lake. We boarded on time, but then spent about 45 minutes de-icing the plane, since a couple of inches of snow had built up on all horizontal surfaces of the plane. Our connections at Salt Lake were beginning to look questionable.

From Cincinnati to Salt Lake, we passed over alternating clear and cloudy areas. Even though we love to look at the landscape, the best part was the cloudy areas, because the sun was at the right angle to create full circle rainbows in the clouds below. One was even a triple circle, with the intense colors in the center echoing and re-echoing in wider, fainter circles. Our pilot made up about 30 minutes, so we were only 15 minutes late when we landed. After a mad dash down one terminal and up the next, we made it with about 5 minutes to spare for our Bozeman flight.

Unfortunately, a low level cloud cover kept us from seeing the Tetons and into the park. After landing at Bozeman, we stopped at the Costco for rotisserie chicken, trail mix, and wine. We made a quick call to Ballpark and Cathy M. After stopping at the Livingston Albertson’s for necessary items like coke, bagels, and cream cheese, we were on our way to the park. Just outside of Livingston, we were delayed while a house was moved through an area where the guide rails were very close to the road. On the way down, we saw many dead deer at the side of the road, usually surrounded by ravens and magpies. We saw 2 ospreys, 3 bald eagles, and a couple of large herds of deer. We took the Old Yellowstone Trail from Corwin Springs to Gardiner, where we saw 2 more bald eagles just down from the iron bridge. We thought we saw another eagle near the corral entrance, but when we backed up to get a closer look with the binoculars, we couldn’t find it. The resident Gardiner elk herd was out in full force.

We got checked in, ate, unpacked just the necessities, downloaded the day's pictures, and collapsed. We were in bed by 7 p.m. and slept soundly until 5 a.m.