Unlike most RV Rallys, there was no commercial component to this rally. It was entirely organized by volunteers. Everyone just pitched in to make things happen. My personal contribution was to take pictures (portraits) of all the attendees and then to post the pictures with the correct identity of each person. While this took me a huge amount of time (I was posting every night), I do think it helped people learn each others names more quickly. The best part for me was that by working with the attendance list and pictures, I think I actually did learn everyone's name. Here's the picture of us that someone else took.
We had wonderful pot-luck dinners every night and fun evening activities such as a birthday present version of the stealing Christmas presents game. Mostly it was a wonderful chance to meet in person people with whom we've corresponded for a number of years. I think that everyone had a wonderful time and it was clear that many more sub-rallys will occur as people travel near each other throughout the year.
The other highlight of our week was that Brad & Laura Kildow and their son Garrick came to vist us in West Yellowstone. Brad & Laura were AFSers with me to Sweden in 1975-76 and we re-connected on the AFS Reunion Cruise last fall. (Yes, Brad & Laura were both AFSers; they married each other after college.) Garrick is in the Air Force and is headed to Korea in September. He is a delightful young man and we wish him lots of luck. For some unknown reason I can't find the pictures Garrick took of us that evening. I'll keep working on that.
Robert and I stayed in West Yellowstone for a few days after the official end of the rally. We wanted to have a few days to visit Yellowstone by ourselves. (There were so many rally activities that we were afraid that we wouldn't have time to do our wild animal search.) On Sunday we joined a small group of NuWa Rally people for a private tour of Yellowstone. The advantage of the private tour is that someone else is driving so we could all focus on looking for animals. The highlight of that tour was this bull-elk that we saw in the early afternoon.
I also captured some impressive pictures of cow elk with very young calves.
We were carrying all our elaborate camera equipment including the spotting scope and my 500mm lens in hopes of a really great bear or wolf picture, but we weren't so fortunate. It appeared that most animals had taken Sunday off. The steaming sulfer pots were as impressive as ever.
We did spend one afternoon in the Bear and Wolf Discovery Center in West Yellowstone. Although we had seen much more impressive grizzly bear last summer in Alaska, this wolf was pretty impressive.
From Yellowstone we've changed directions; we're headed east and south! for a surprise to be revealed on Monday.
Leslie
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