It was still raining. Bozeman has a college, so it is a fairly busy little town of 22,000. It has several old motels.

I left the motel fairly late, then went to a grocery store to pick up supplies: a five pound bag of apples, a one pound box of Cheez-Its, and six one-liter bottles of Diet Mountain Dew. Appropriately outfitted, I headed for the American Computer Museum.

I guess Bozeman, Montana, sitting at the feet of snow-capped mountains, is not a place one would normally expect to find a computer museum, but it was a nice history complete with some very nice artifacts.

The woman who apparently runs the place had an accent, maybe Russian. I signed the guest book and she took my three dollars. She asked if I worked with computers and if I felt knowledgeable about them.

Another visitor had come in a few minutes before me (we were the only two during my stay) and I missed the first few minutes of the introductory videotape. I still caught it from before Babbage and Ada through the present day.

After the tape the woman gave us a very hurried tour through the exhibits. It still took a few minutes, in spite of her high-speed constant dialog. There was a math book from a hundred years ago, a letter signed by Thomas Jefferson, an abacus, some mechanical adding machines, slide rules, and some cash registers.

Electrical computing hardware was covered from telephone relays to vacuum tubes to transistors to integrated circuits. One of my favorites of this type was a chart that showed that a Pentium-equivalent processor made with vacuum tubes would be three feet wide, six feet tall, and six hundred miles long.

A room was devoted to the Apollo project and the way it accelerated computer development. The woman's face lit up when she discussed Apollo. She said she was a big fan of the program, and you could tell by the look in her eye when she talked about it.

There was a hall they called "Computasaurus" that had a Univac and several generations of IBM mainframes. The walls were decorated with punch cards.

I guess I'm going on a bit about this. I'll just include a couple of things that struck close to home for me: a collection of calculators and a display of personal computers.

The calculators featured mostly Texas Instruments and Hewlett-Packard models. The HP 35, she said, marked the end of the slide rule. I also spotted my first two HP calculators. I got all misty.

The personal computers section started with the KIM-1, Altair 8800, and IMSAI 8080. They also had an Apple II and III, an early Mac and even a Lisa. There was a Commodore Pet and a VIC 20, an Atari 400, a TI 99/4a, and an original IBM PC. There were a lot more, too, but I'm sure most of you are getting very bored now.

After I left the museum I decided to skip the Museum of the Rockies and head directly (or as directly as possible) down to Yellowstone.

It was raining, and I got stuck for a long time behind a dump truck towing an additional load. There were times I probably could have passed, but I couldn't see ahead of him due to the spray he was kicking up. Other people passed both of us, but I didn't want to take the chance.

Finally the truck turned off in Big Sky. I should say that by "stuck" I mean 55-60 mph, so it wasn't that bad.

I officially entered Yellowstone driving down US 195 and was in it for about twenty miles. I think I also entered Wyoming, although that wasn't marked. In fact, I don't think I've seen a "Welcome to Wyoming" sign yet.

There was a series of fires ten years ago in Yellowstone. Realizing that fires are a natural part of the ecosystem, the parks service decided then to adopt a "let it burn" policy. The effects of the fires were very apparent along this little stretch. While the ground is green and growing, there were hundreds of dead trees standing and even more lying on the ground.

I left Yellowstone and drove a few more miles to West Yellowstone, Montana. This is a very intensely touristy town. I had a bowl of chili at a café before heading in to the park.

At one point the traffic came to a standstill, then moved ahead a few cars at a time. Eventually I got to the cause of the problem: a herd of maybe four dozen bison, including babies, was split on either side of the road. Everyone was stopping to look.

Then I got to see what I'd mainly come here to see: a geyser basin. The rain stopped just long enough for me to walk the loop, then started again. That was nice of it.

Dozens of cars almost filled the lot and the boardwalk was crowded as we wandered among the colorful bubbling mud and rising steam. I saw one geyser spit out a little six-foot stream of water. The air was full of sulfur, but I didn't mind.

I even got some sound.

Back on the road I passed a few more geyser basins. There were also just isolated spots where steam was rising from the ground.

This must have been amazing for the first people who visited, especially since they had no idea what to expect. What would they make of hot water, mud, and steam shooting up out of the ground?

I passed another congested area, this time people stopped to photograph a lone elk or some other animal like that.

I didn't stop, but in retrospect I wish I'd photographed the people. I will try to do more of that on the rest of my stay. I'm not going to be able to photograph these natural wonders in a way that hasn't been done a million times, but I think exploring the crowds would be something different.

I checked in at the lodge and found my little brown cabin. It is a duplex unit, and I've heard my neighbors debate the rules of hearts, among other things. The walls are very thin and do almost nothing to block sound.

The sun finally showed up, so I put the top down as I drove over to the Old Faithful Inn to make reservations for dinner. I also made reservations for dinner tomorrow night at the Lake Lodge.

I wandered around the lobby of the inn for a while, gawking. It is ninety-year-old log building. I noticed on a sign that it was time for Old Faithful to erupt, so I went outside to stand with hundreds of other people.

Old Faithful is neither the highest nor most dependable geyser in the park, but it is the most famous. For twenty minutes we stood around waiting. Many people gave up. About a half dozen times during the wait short ten- to twenty-foot squirts came out of the ground.

Finally, twenty minutes after the predicted time, we got a nice eruption, just as in all the pictures.

The sunlight vanished just as it finished. I went back into the inn and had a couple of beers at the Bear Pit lounge.

I went back to the cabin to write and listen to my neighbors more. My dinner reservation was at 9:15, and it was still raining, so I drove rather than walked.

I had to wait a while to get in, but I finally did. The food was nice, but it wasn't God's Gift to Fine Dining as people claim. I also found this to be true at the North Rim Lodge last year.

I did have a nice beer, the Sleeping Giant Brewing Company Back Country Scottish Ale. In fact, I had two.

Most of the employees of AmFac, the company that does the lodging and food (and everything else) concessions in Yellowstone (and a lot of other national parks, too), wear tags with their first names and home states. Most of the employees are young, too, probably just out of college.

Because of this I will refer to them by first name and state.

My waitress was Amy West Virginia. A couple of years ago she moved out of her apartment and out here hoping to find a job in the park. I think that's pretty amazing.

Amy has a slightly older twin sister. Her parents were expecting a (large) boy. The doctor delivered her sister and left. A while later they brought in another doctor to deliver Amy, who was a surprise to everyone. They didn't have a name picked out, so they settled on "Amy" a few days later.

Amy gave up a day off this week so that a coworker could spend time with his visiting girlfriend. A while back her sister visited and no one would work for her, so she made a point of working for someone else when the opportunity arose. I think many people would have refused for revenge.

Tomorrow I am just going to drive around and see what happens.