Our Lucky Day

After a wonderful night on the town with the whole Hoskins family, we drove back to the Hoskins' home in Bountiful and the kids said good-bye to their Dad and their Grandpa Hoskins.  Bright and early on the morning of the 6th, they caught a flight out of Salt Lake City and landed back in our old hometown in Minnesota.  Once there, they loaded our storage unit into a U-Haul truck, turned the key to the storage unit back over to the desk clerk, and made the seven hour drive up to our new home in Bismarck, North Dakota.  A few days later, on the 11th of July, Grandma Hoskins, the kids, and I set out on our own drive to North Dakota.  It was hard to believe that our six months of house-hopping and vacationing was finally coming to a close, but it was even more difficult to believe that we were actually going to be settling down somewhere for the unforeseeable future.  I still can't believe that somewhere is Bismarck, North Dakota, but hey, I suppose it will be an exercise in blooming where we are planted.

 

Anyway, there will be more about Bismarck to come, I am sure.  Before we got there; however, our two day drive took us through my old college stomping ground in Rexburg, Idaho, and then to our third National Park this month--Yellowstone National Park.  We were only just driving through the park, but low and behold, as we cut up towards Mammoth Hot Springs, we came upon row after row of cars and eager park guests.  We pulled over as well, and right there by the side of the road was a huge old grizzly bear!  They never seem to be around when you're visiting the park, especially when you need them for your last spot on Yellowstone Bingo, but when you're in a hurry driving through, there they sit, digging and savaging about.  The kids went wild, so we made a brief stopover to watch before the rangers realized what was going on and shooed us all away.  It was actually pretty exciting, and Grandma said it just must have been our lucky day!  Either that, or maybe God just wanted us to be in a good mood before we headed out across the barren wasteland of eastern Montana and Western North Dakota.  It's no wonder they call it the Badlands.  Oh, our lucky day indeed.