Helena to Yellowstone

Yellowstone was just a journey away but where do we stay.

We obviously thought it was a bit like the Lake District in the UK. Littered with cheap hotels and places to stay. Oops.

The National Parks in the US are protected and mostly if not entirely devoid of privately owned accommodation. That means that anything near them is big bucks and not in the deer sense.

Internet Overdrive

I spent a good hour or two on the net and then ringing places on Skype, drawing more blanks than a pro dominos player. Eventually, I was directed to the West Yellowstone Chamber of Commerce. They keep a list of hotels with rooms and it is updated throughout the day, which is a golden winner.

Well, it would have been if anyone had any rooms, but they didn’t.

Tip 13 – Ring the Chambers of Commerce near popular destinations. They have secrets sometimes.

With nowhere to stay that evening, I went into internet overdrive scouring the web using Google Local, TripAdvisor, Travelocity, and lots of other sites. In the end, the Best Western website won, with a single room at their West Yellowstone hotel, an expensive albeit very big one.

Big Family?

When travelling with 3 kids, there are sometimes issues with booking a single room although most of them have two double or queen size beds. It wouldn’t have mattered at this hotel, as the room was like a small aircraft hangar.

It seems that the overpopulation ‘issue’ can usually be solved either using money – paying $10 extra for a rollaway bed or by inadvertently forgetting to mention the extra child and sneaking them in a suitcase while checking in. Sometimes the hotel does not allow more than 4 people in a single room, so it may be worth checking.

If our kids hadn’t wanted to sleep on the floor, we would have bought a sleeping bag, but as it was, they were fighting for the rights to the excitement of the floor, so it wasn’t an issue.

Tip 14 – The lowest price rooms have the most beds – two doubles or queens in every hotel or motel we stayed in, even the cheapest ones.

The Best Western West Yellowstone was a bit of a stinger for the budget.

I was planning on keeping the average hotel room to under $100 where possible and this one was $233! At least it was early in the trip so we could make it back by staying in some really low quality motels if necessary. Not the best ploy as you will discover later.

Trappers Breakfast

They issued vouchers for breakfast, making this the only place we stayed that did this, and we were only given 2. We could buy more for a few dollars but it was a bit tight compared to most other places. They also checked the vouchers before they seated you. west Yellowstone is obviously in high demand.

It was called the Trappers Breakfast and was pretty good, but they were doing the trapping. Nice to see plenty of dead animal skins around the walls. Obviously they were surplus to the park’s requirements..

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Most places we stayed didn’t seem to care how many people had breakfast, you could have wandered off the street and eat there for free in many cases.

Tip 15 – Check if the hotel offers breakfast and how many you get.

Once it was booked, we set off for the park. Which is utterly jaw dropping.

The best way to describe Yellowstone park is that it is a bit like visiting an alien planet and therefore it gets its own page – Yellowstone Park.