Part 6: the last part of my dream trip, then back to civilization in Salt Lake City

The raft trip on the Snake River was nice, but because it was still spring chilly, I chose not to go on the white water section. As you can see from the rafts pictured above, we didn't even paddle ourselves; our guide used oars to paddle us down a short section of the river.

Next time I'll go on the white water part or else rent a kayak! Or do both!! I did notice that Western water is more powerful and swifter than Eastern. Probably from all of the snow and ice melting up in the mountains and gushing downward.

I sat at the end of the raft. The cottonwoods are those light green, airy-looking trees that you see behind me.

Lots of cottnwoods lined the river banks, and I saw my first lovely lupine when we stopped for lunch. The guide said that if we came back in autumn (late August/early September in Wyoming!) that we would get to see the cottonwoods turn that bright beautiful yellow. Later in a meadow at Jenny Lake in the Grand Tetons National Park (GTNP), I got to see even more lupine.

Me--taking my first selfie--at Jenny Lake!

Just found these images on the net--apparently, cottonwoods in contrast to aspen have these dark trunks and branches. Like the birches up in New England, the apen have the white branches. Both are rather dramatic shows of autumn color. By the way, I love trees and mountains and rivers and autumn! Just saying!

After my voyage down the Snake River and some more hiking at Jenny Lake in the GTNP, the next day I headed to Salt Lake City to catch my plane home. The drive, mostly through Wyoming, some a bit west into Idaho, and then into Utah, was even prettier than my first-day drive through Idaho into Montana.

Primarily, I drove through several national forests with mountains and many creeks and rivers and lakes but occasionally, there would pop up these "little" towns--like Etna, WY, population 163, or Thayne, WY, population 147. I also could see evidence that many of these roads that I was on in late May would be closed in the winter when the snows came, which I figured was prety much from September through April here in Wyoming. I'm betting these people really love their springs and summers.

One of the best surprises awaiting me in Salt Lake City was my hotel--the Little American Hotel. After staying at the Best Western in West Yellowstone, Montana, and the very modern but very small and somewhat expensive Motel 6 in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, I was in for quite a treat!

It was there in the hotel dining room that I also had the best dinner of my whole trip--fresh river trout, sweet potato cassarole, fresh green beans and salad, and yeast rolls. Yum, yum, I can still taste it all!

Like many of the bigger cities in Utah and Wyoming and Idaho, Salt Lake City is surrounded by mountains,which I could see from my hotel. The next morning before heading to the airport, I went to see the Mormon Temple at Mormon Square, quite close to my hotel. Wish I had had a few more hours to explore that area, which is an amazing man-made sacred shrine to God.

But lovely as it was, the Mormon Temple does not compare to God's creation on this earth--the grandest Grand Teton Mountains! Don't miss seeing them with your own eyes!

Part 5: the best part of a dream journey

Mark Twain said, "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindededness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, whole, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one's little corner of the earth all one's lifetime."

Traveling is important to me, and it is life-changing and life-expanding. Besides my frequent warm weather jaunts to East Tennessee or Western North Carolina or Northern Georgia to kayak with friends, I like to have a "big" trip in the saving's and planning stage.

Right now I'm saving, but I haven't quite decided where I'll go next. I'm considering the following places in no particular order: Charleston, SC; Highway 1 in Northern California; Mammoth Cave, KY; Rocky Mountain National Park, CO; Outter Banks, NC, Glacier National Park, MT, and Greece and Ireland. Just day-dreaming and listening to intuition for now.

The Pacific North West (Seattle and Victoria, British Columbia), the Grand Canyon, Alaska, Yosemite, and New England (Vermont and Acadia, Maine, especially) have been some of my favorite places that I've visited, And now I can add the Grand Tetons to that list!

As I exited Yellowstone and traveled along US 26/89/191 on the sixth day of my 12-day journey, I wasn't quite prepared for what was to greet me. I turned a curve in the road, and suddenly, there they were--bigger than life--the Grand Tetons--one of the prettiest parts of the Rocky Mountains. My mouth literally dropped open. There they stood in their granite majesty with their sharp, craggy, icy, rocky beauty. There they stood against the bluest skies and reflected in the waters of Jackson Lake.

In contrast to their largeness bloomed the sweetest, little yellow spring flowers with brown centers.

Oh my, the Grand Tetons are indeed the loveliest mountain range I have ever seen! I will have to paint them one day soon.

Like any other place, of course, I'm sure you know that mere pictures don't do those mountains justice because pictures are simply one dimensional and visual. If one is not there, s/he misses out on the sounds, the fragrances, the tastes, and feel of the place. But the pictures take me back momentarily to my experience of the place.

These spring beauties were captured a few days later at Jenny Lake, along with these lovely aspen trees.

This is the picture that I will paint one day, but I will make the sky blue with those white clouds and the water of Jackson Lake will sparkle from the sun's rays! The Tetons are among the youngest mountains on the continent. Together the mountain range and valley (in which sits the town of Jackson) frame a majestic landscape of eight large lakes, many glaciers, numerous snowfields, and extensive pine, fir, and spruce forests.

After many more stops along the way that afternoon, I arrived in the famous ski town of Jackson or Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Jackson Hole sits in a high mountain valley; that's why it's usually called Jackson Hole. The valley is encompassed by the ranges of the Grand Tetons, bordered by the Teton Range on the west and the Gros Ventre Range on the east. Bisected by the Snake River, the valley is 80 miles long and 15 miles wide. It is a recreational utopia.

The town of Jackson has a marvelous old town square, adorned in each corner with four elk horn arches. It is dotted with a mix of historical buildings, upscale eateries, shops, and saloons. It is an art collector's paradise. The side walks appear to be made of old barn boards.

I spent the next four days in Jackson Hole--sight-seeing, hiking, shopping, rafting, and learning some of its history. After moutain men explored the area and trapped animals, the Homestead Act drew pioneers willing to take a chance on improving a free plot of land by the 1890s. The harsh climate sent many packing, but those who stayed and toughed it out used the abandoned parcels of land to their advantage and developed large ranches.

Several days later as I was buying boots for my granddaughters Tessa and Livvy, I actually met some of those ranchers, coming into town on a Saturday night!

Besides getting back to the Grand Tetons National Park every day that I could, I was looking forward to my raft trip on the celebrated Snake River.

The new pixar movie "Inside Out"

The new pixar movie Inside Out intrigued me. Like the main human character Riley, when I was young, I had been moved from a place that I loved to a new, unfamiliar place, and like her, I felt overwhelmed by all of my feelings. But unlike her, this experience happened to me time and again.

I do not think that Inside Out is a movie meant for children younger than, say seven. And even then, for them, discussing the movie with a grown up may be helpful.

On the other hand, I guess the movie could be watched on a purely superficial level. After all my son-in-law Nekos took the granddaughters, ages 5 and 2, to see the movie recently, and they seemed to enjoy it. But did they really have any idea what was going on? I'll have to ask them.

Like the novel Pilgrim's Progress or the drama Everyman, the movie Inside Out is an allegory--where five characters in the film represent abstract ideas. In this case, five of the main characters each personify an emotion. There are also three other characters in the movie who are human beings: 11-year-old Riley and her parents.

The two main characters in the movie are Happiness (Joy) and Sadness. Besides the humans, the other characters are Anger, Fear, and Disgust. These five emotions are supposedly the basic human emotions that we feel and that control the way we act or sometimes "act out." That's one of the aspects of the movie that intrigued me: these basic human emotions.

A short bit of research on basic human emotions revealed that some scientists believe that we have four human emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, and anger. Other believe that we have six basic emotions, adding disgust and surprise to the list. The main writer of Inside Out chose to go with the belief in six emotions, but he also chose to leave out surprise. Other scientists come up with seven emotions, and add contempt (hate) to the list. Still others add trust and anticipation to the list of basic human emotions, so that would make nine. Plus add in all of the "complex" emotions, and we are just one emotional heap!

Interesting to note that five of these nine emotions are negative ones. Or as in the movie four out of five of the emotions are negative. (Wow. That's curious. I'll have to think about that more later.) In the movie, it was Happiness that tried to dominate how the 11-year-old Riley viewed the world and felt about the recent move. Her parents had just moved her from Minnesota to San Francisco.

My own parents moved us no less than a dozen times before I reached the age of 17. I was born in Charleston, SC, then moved on to Camden, SC, then on to Chattanooga, TN, where I attended kindergarten, then on to Richmond, VA, then to Madison, TN, where I had some pretty idyllic childhood years, then to Old Hickory, TN. From there, we moved on to Louisville, KY, then there was a very short move to Orange, TX, then back to Madsion, TN, where I spend my best high school years, Then to Wilmington, NC, and then to Grifton, NC, where I graduated from high school. Then on we moved to Seaford, DE. From there I went to college in Murfreesboro, TN.

Now to you, I know those sound only like a listing of cities that my family lived in, but for me, each of those cities has memories--memories--as the movie made clear--that became part of my personality and part of my long term memory bank. Each of those moves informed who I became. I've written a blog post about most of those places. (Sadly, I didn't take the time to write about most of those place until I retired in my 60s. Had I been able to write about those places sooner, perhaps I could have had more peace in my life.)

Back to Inside Out, the movie makes a big deal about Riley having to move to San Francisco when she was 11 years old. It nearly tears her apart, and I could really relate to what she was going through. Her strong "islands" or staples of emotions that informed her personality were family, friendship, ice hockey (her main interest), honesty, and goofball island. As each island crumbled because of the damage caused by the move, Riley began to lose herself.

Joy kept trying to keep or put her back together, but she was not giving Sadness her fair access to Riley's psyche. Riley's mother kept telling her that they needed her to be her usual happy-go-lucky self to counteract all the things that kept going wrong with the move. It was all so familiar to me, and it all made so much sense.

My parents too would depend on me to stay happy during our many moves--but I, of course, felt anything but happy. I felt sad for loss of friendships, and angry for loss of interests (in one high school, the next year, my senior year, I was looking forward to being the literary editor of the school paper, but then we moved). I felt fearful going into new classrooms and seeing that sea of new faces looking up at me. Within my family, we did not discuss these feelings or thoughts. With each move so many questions buzzed through my young mind: would I be able to keep up with the new school work? Had I missed something important that I needed to know? Time and again--at least a dozen times--I lost myself.

But in all those soul-stealing moves and in my parents' constant fighting, I did not allow myself to feel sad. Once I left home for college, I had completely lost myself. College, for me, was a terrible experience, so I ended up marrying Tommy Cooper to escape it and to escape my family, and the rest is history (I've written my memoirs in my blog, which I have linked to several times above).

In the movie, once Riley allowed herself to feel her sadness (and once Joy allowed Sadness to take center stage), she and her parents talked about her and their feelings and comforted her, and Riley is on the way to adjusting herself to the move, to rebuilding her islands, and to finding herself again.

My family of origin lacked two important things that Rily's family had: strong family support and goofiness. For some reason, my family was not demostrative of nor verbal about their love for each other or for us daughters, and my family was always sooo serious. There was never any joking around or family fun. (When families constantly move around, they need to be strong families with strong senses of themselves to survive move after move.) Since my family environment had not been conducive to expressing feelings, as the song states, I began to look for love in all the wrong places.

Once I became a teacher, teaching was my island that I practically based my whole personality on! Then as my marriages didn't work out, friendship became an important island. Finally in my late 30s/early 40s, white water kayaking became a major island for me. In my retirement once teaching island crumbled, I had a hard time adjusting. I had lost myself again! Then art/writing island was born. And once my daughter married and my granddaughters were born, family island became significant. It's fun and interesting to take notice of the islands that inform our sense of self and that create our personalities.  

The lesson that the movie Inside Out teaches us so well is that if one is not allowed to feel sadness--to acknowledge so-called "negative" emotions--then her psyche cannot heal and the opposite emotion (happiness in this case) cannot re-surface. It's all so clear to me now. So I ask the Universe, can I go back and relive my teens and college years and twenties, knowing what I know now? Probably not.

An A+ movie. Go see it and have fun! I plan to take Tessa (my five-year-old granddaughter) to see it again! It helped me to understand myself better; perhaps it will help her too.    

Part 4 of a dream journey--days 2-4 in Yellowstone

On day two, Mary from the hotel advised me to go to the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone, and it was my favorite place that I visited in the park.

On the way to the canyon, I stopped to hike at the Paint Pots--and to watch those bubbling hot springs sprew their bright colors.

But it was the canyon that really mystified me! I could see immediately how Yellowstone Park got its name, and the waterfalls--both the upper and lower falls--were magnificent. And it was there that I first saw the Yellowstone River, which creates the waterfall below.

Stopping at a 1950's style cafe near the Canyon Lodge (which was not yet open), once again I had worked up a healthy appetite and appreciated a traditional lunch of delicious cheeseburger and fries. Thus ended another good day at YNP.

The next day back in West Montana, I decided to take a break from driving into the park. Instead I sayed in town and went to a bear (grizzly) and wolf sanctuary there in town. It was amazing to see those creatures so close up. They are truly beautiful wild animals.

Also I toured the historic Union Pacific train station, where in 1907 and thereafter, tourists used to come in on the train and then take stagecoaches through the park to the hotels. Until then visitation to the part was minimal because of its remote location, difficult access, and primitive accommodations. I took a step back in time as I toured the museum and the famous Union Pacific dining hall.

In my stay at West Yellowstone, Montana, I met so many people from all over the US and from other countries, such as the Netherlands and Australia. There were a lot of Asian tourists. One morning at breakfast when I asked an Asian woman where she was from, she answered, "LA! That's in California." West Yellowstone is a small town, but because of its gateway into Yellowstone, it's very cosmopolitan.

My last day in Yellowstone Park, once again I entered through the West Gate, but this time I drove 100 miles through the park to the South Gate, stopping at Mud Pots to hike to the mysterious Dragon's Mouth and other bubbling geothermal mud hot springs, where bufallo like to hang out to get warm in the winter. You'll see one fellow napping near a hot springs in the third picture below!

The number of geothermal features in Yellowstone--from geysers to hot springs to mud pots--is estimated at 10,000. YNP sits in a huge volcanic basin (caldera), which was the site of several massive volcanic eruptions, the last of which occurred about 600,000 years ago. These springs and geysers are caused by the build up of hot water and steam trapped below the surface.

Having seen enough geothermal features for this trip into Yellowstone, I was heading out, but it seemed that the antelope and bufallo did not want me to leave.

But by then, I was on my merry way to the Grand Tetons and famous Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to find out what made the Tetons grand and Jackson Hole famous, and nothing could stop me now--not even a few dozen bufallo!