What to do in Yellowstone when you've seen all the wildlife and thermal features

...or just when you are waiting for everyone else to eat their sandwiches.  We had a great time in Yellowstone, it was amazing!  We saw lots of wildlife, lots of geysers, mudpots, fumaroles, and so on.  The best part was our campfire cookout with real cowboys on our last night. 

Hope you all are having a good summer and hopefully I'll be able to catch up on your blogs soon!

Where I've been hanging out...

Yes, that's me on the left climbing those rocks - hard to believe, huh? (My 17 year old son is on the right in red.) It was amazing and I'm so glad we did it!

Distance to the top of the wall was 50 feet...

...and even though I wasn't sure I could do it, I ended up making it all the way up!  Woo-hoo!  Big thanks to our guide Lindsey from Sylvan Rocks Climbing School - I highly recommend this company if you are ever in the Black Hills and want to learn how to climb!

We are about halfway through our "trip of a lifetime" and we've had a great time.  The weather is incredibly hot so we are looking forward to the next few days in Yellowstone where it is supposed to cool off a bit.  More to come next time I get a chance to post - hope you all are doing well!

I spoke too soon!

The weather has taken a turn for the better!  Hooray!  My friend Linda and I took advantage of it and took a long walk together this morning - it felt so good to get out in the sunshine.

Yesterday I spent nearly 5 hours in the car, driving my kids to and fro to various activities...it's actually highly unusual for me to use the car so much but it just so happened that there were several things on one day and there was no way around it.  The funny thing is, there was just an article in our newspaper this week where it said in Belgium we spend the most time in traffic jams, compared to all other European and North American countries; and according to the research cities like Antwerp and Brussels are even worse than London, New York or Paris.  Well, either that article cursed me or I guess it must be true...

But it wasn't all bad.  I saw a good part of the French speaking part of Brabant, too.  It's funny how just a 15 minute drive from our house puts us over the language border and feeling like we're in another country.  Everything is subtly different, and of course, when we stop somewhere we get to practice our French!  So that made the driving around actually interesting.  And slightly more bearable...

You call this summer?

From what I hear, the US is having a big heat wave right now...we definitely are not!  It's raining and 13 degrees celsius, not what I'd call summer weather at all!  I think it's supposed to get better next week - I could really use a few nice sunny days...

So...I trucked myself off to the gym.  I haven't actually been to the gym in almost two weeks - between being on call at home for my studiers, and last week actually getting sick, I never got there.  The only thing I've been able to do for the past week is walking, but I've managed about 2 kilometers every day, which is better than nothing.

I'm still on antibiotics but was feeling somewhat more normal this morning (and frankly buggy to get out of the house), so I decided to try a laid-back version of my usual Monday routine: a hill walk on the treadmill, some upper body weights, and then the elliptical.  The funny thing is, I quickly felt that I was going to have to cut back on both intensity and duration - after about ten minutes I started getting that cold and clammy sweaty feeling, so I took the incline and the speed back down and ended up doing a rather leisurely stroll for 20 minutes.  Same with the weights and elliptical - shorter and less intense than usual, paying attention to how I felt the whole time.  Just 15 minutes on the elliptical and that was definitely enough.

Am I disappointed?  A bit.  But what can you do?  All I care about right now is getting back to 100% before our big vacation in a couple of weeks.  And I figure a little bit of moderate exercise is probably the best thing.

13 Today!

I'm now officially the mother of three teenagers!

He looks the part, doesn't he? ;-)

He's Back!

Inspiring! Watching Matt dance with people all over the world again reminds me of how uplifted I felt when I first saw the original video in 2008. Here's his latest one:

Blog Virus?

A friend of mine just told me she gets a message from her antivirus software that there is a virus on my blog when she pulls the page up...has anyone else had this when visiting this blog (or any other blog)?  I've been trying to figure out how to fix it, so if anyone has any information to share, I'd really appreciate it!