This is the fourth of five entries while in Livingston, unless I get sick of it. I am currently waiting for the laundry in this motel to become available and this is as good an activity in the meantime.

So now, we've relocated to Grant Village, which is a pretty good spot on the southern shores of Lake Yellowstone.

I started the day with breakfast in one of the restaurants. While I've been on these programs I have absolutely pigged out at breakfast, because it's there and because I've already paid for it. I may well be paying for it again through a bigger gut and higher cholestorol, but what the heck.

I decided to take a big risk at breakfast. At the motel in Rawlins, the deluxe continental breakfast options included biscuits and gravy. On observation, this looked like scones and mucus, so I didn't partake. But the same thing was here, and while I couldn't trust it in Rawlins, I thought it might be a safer bet in Grant Village, where presumably they do have a vested interest in their guests walking out alive. I will not be eating it again. It doesn't taste that bad, but it's altogether too weird.

Today we were headed for a walk north west of Old Faithful. When we finished that, we would go to Old Faithful itself to watch it erupt. This promised to be an excellent day.

We were driving for no more than about 10 minutes. I was seated in the second last row on the left hand side. A young couple, Kellie and Brian were behind me. Out of the corner of my eye, and of Kellie's eye, as it turned out, I saw something big and black and when I looked again, I saw it was a bear, about 20 or 30 yards off the side of the road. Kellie, Brian and I all called out at the same time. Brian was the most coherent 'There's a bear right there' he said. Ashea stopped and reversed and for the next 5 minutes, while other cars flew past, we got to watch a grizzly bear sow and her rather large cub trundle through the bush, stopping every 100 yards or so to dig something up and eat it. I think all of us were grining ear to ear, this was so thrilling. I'd pretty much given up on seeing a grizzly, and really not with that much regret. I certainly don't want to see one when walking alone, even with all the songs I've got to sing now. But I'll certainly take this one. I said we had the bears to ourselves for a while but eventually someone else had to see it and once one other car stopped there were soon half a dozen. With that came idiotic behaviour - one old geezer got out of his car and walked to the edge of the forest to get a picture of them. He would no doubt have gone further if Ashea hadn't yelled out to him to get back in his car.

A couple of facts about bears. They keep their cubs for 2 winters, so they only produce cubs (up to 3) once every three years. At the moment they are in hypersomething phase, where they eat and eat in preparation for hibernation for at least 6 months. They are considered by scientists to be 'super' hibernators. One aspect of this is that their heart rate slows down to about one beat ever 15 seconds. They stay fast asleep for the whole 6 months although they might occasionally wake if and when it gets warmer. Finally, and apologies for anybody with delicate sensibilities, one of the group asked Ashea what happens with the body functions while they are hibernating. Well, the bear eats some particular root or something which forms, and this is the correct technical term, a 'butt plug' which lasts the whole winter. How good is that? Peter Mahon, this may not be a dispatch from Butt Plug, Nebraska, but at least I've gotten around to using the term in a perfectly legitimate manner.

My photos are not that good. As previously mentioned, I am a crap photographer, my little camera is not made for wildlife photography and on top of that the batteries were just about exhausted, and in fact died in the process. Hopefully I can cadge a good one or 2 from someone else on the trip.

I might just digress slightly here for a moment. Not many of you will have hear of what I might call the Hobbit theorum, which states that pigs and wombats are the only animals you kick in the bum to make them go backwards. Geoff Atkinson and I have discussed this at some length and wondered whether and how this could be proven.

I for one would not like to volunteer to test this theorum on a grizzly bear. For one thing, they travel quite fast and you would have to be running in order to catch up and therefore have difficulty in delivering a good kick. Perhaps an Australian Rules footballer would have the skill. Larger animals such as bison and elk have high riding bums so you would need some sort of apparatus such as a step ladder to test it out and I doubt they would hang around long enough to deliver the kick.

Back to the story at hand.

Once the crowd got ridiculously large, we headed on to Old Faithful, just to check out a couple of the buildings there. On the outskirts of the village, someone spotted a coyote. At this point, we could have gone home and all been happy, I think.

After a short stop at Old Faithful village, we proceeded to our trailhead. The trail leads out to a waterfall and then to Grand Prismatic Spring, a hot spring.

I won't go into the detail, but this was all good. There is a photo of the falls, and a rabbit eared tree standing nearby. The springs were also pretty and I was settling down for a bit of a snooze when I was rudely awakened by Ashea to get ready for a walk up a small mountain behind us. It is one of two identical mountains called Twin Buttes, or Mae West as it is known colloguially.

The climb up was challenging, alright, but incredibly exhilerating and by the time everybody reached the top, there was a sense of collective pride that doesn't come often. Someone took a photo to memorialise the moment. I don't have it yet, but will post it as soon as I have it.

After this, the rest of the day was really just icing on the cake. On the way back to the trailhead, we took a short detour to get a view of the lake basin. Again spectacular. We had a look around the over one hundred year old Old Faithul Inn. I've put a picture of part of the lobby. We walked the Old Faithful circuit, looking at littel geysers with names like Tardy, Old Tardy and Spasmodic. We watched Old Faithful, so named because it has been erupting on a regular 45 or so minute basis since white people first settled here, erupt. Even here, our luck was in, because it kept going for a good few minutes, whereas its eruptions can range from one to five minutes.

That's the last photo in this lot.

We had a huge celebratory dinner that night. I ate way too much and had a big glass of whisky to finish, but I figured I could do it just this once.

Well, the selfish buggers who have been using the laundry still haven't removed their clothes so I'm out of here. I'll have to catch up on yesterday and today wherever I am tonight.