Allison Cafe

Sep
20
2009

The Great Road Trip 2009 Part 4: Grand Tetons National Park

Jackson Lake, Signal Mountain Campground

Part 4: After viewing the impressive geysers at Old Faithful, we continued south through the park to the south entrance of Yellowstone and the entrance to the Grand Teton National Park. If Glacier and Yellowstone weren’t impressive enough, the Grand Teton mountain range certainly took our breath away. It is just incredible to see the impressive natural wonders that exist within our own country. The John Rockefeller Highway that takes you through this part of the park happened to be under construction while we were there. My parents had warned us that the roads were stripped down to dirt roads and 1 lane at times. Luckily we timed it well and it only set us back a half an hour or so, it wasn’t nearly as bad of a delay as it could have been.

With no time at all it seemed, we arrived Jackson Lake and secured our campsite for the night at Signal Mountain. Wow, all I can say is that if you are looking for a picturesque view of the mountains, with a beautiful lake in the foreground, only steps from your campsite – then this is the campground for you. Best of all it was only about $20. We were in campsite #10, but across from us was an even better site at #12, if you happen to get there early, this is the site to get! One of the nice things about securing your campsite in the early afternoon, is that you are then settled for the day and can simply relax and enjoy your surroundings.

Here again, we had some amazing views, even of the smaller wildlife such as the butterflies and the bees. And the stars, we had forgotten that there were so many, and just how exciting it can be to see shooting stars. It was truly magical. We also

: Pizza night at the campground!

experimented here with RV pizza. We had a Betty Crocker packet of just add water pizza dough, to which we added tomato sauce that was leftover from pasta we had made a previous evening, mozzarella cheese, Canadian bacon slices and pineapple chunks from a small can. It turned out great, we were thankful for our generator which allowed us to use the oven without being plugged in to shore power. This post is already getting to be a novel, so I’ll have to write a separate post about our provisioning for the trip.

The next day we continued our whirlwind tour of the park and drove south along the Teton Parkway road to Jenny Lake, a truly beautiful place. There are some great bike trails in this area, it made us think of the road bikers in our life and what a beautiful bike ride this would be. We continued south to another must see, the Chapel of the

: Chapel of the Transfiguration

Transfiguration. It is a small Episcopal chapel that has a picture window behind the alter, a framed view of the stunning Grand Tetons peaks. We sat in the small pews and took in the beauty and serenity of the moment, only briefly though, we had a time table to keep! Next, we drove through Jackson Hole, Wyoming and stopped to enjoy lunch here at a local restaurant and went window shopping through the downtown streets, lined with wooden sidewalks. It would have been nice to stay longer, but we were weary from travel and knew we needed to keep moving to put some miles behind us, so we kept the RV rolling down the road all the way to Brigham City, Utah.