Grannie Visits Us for a Few Days

Grannie Ali came to visit us in Billings one last time during the second week of September. I stayed home on Tuesday so that we could go find ourselves an adventure. Here's what we did.

We all slept in for as long as we couldn't, but that doesn't mean much. I think we were all up and about by 8am. Here's Izzie and Grannie sitting on the back porch enjoying some coffee.


Soon we were getting ready for the day. We had plans to take Grannie to the Painted Caves park and Pompey's Pillar. We made it out of the house and headed to the Painted Caves first. This also happens to be the second week that we had our new GPS unit, and by this time we were geocaching novices. So, we brought the GPS along so that we could find some caches at our destinations. Here's Grannie and Izzie posing for a picture before we hiked up to the caves.


We found a mouse in a pipe while looking for our first cache. Turns out the cache we were looking for was under the big sign in the middle behind Grannie and Izzie in the first picture. Izzie refused to come close enough to the pipe to look down into it to see the mouse. I'm not sure why she's afraid of things like this, but she is.


I don't know why, but we posed for a lot of pictures, so to prove it here's another one.


Here's the girls looking at the paintings in the first cave.


Here's a cute shot of Izzie wandering around patiently.


Here's Izzie and Grannie checking them out. I like this picture because it shows how Izzie always imitates what other people do. Grannie squatted down to be at Izzie's height while they were talking, but because Grannie squatted down Izzie squatted down. It's funny.


Here's the four of us posing for a picture in front of a painted cave.


Here's Izzie being as cute as can be.



Since the last time that we went to the Painted Caves they've added a visitor center, so we had to check that out while we were there. Here's Nell and Izzie checking out the interactive stuff.


After the visitor center we headed for Pompey's Pillar, and once we got there we promptly climbed to the top. Here's Grannie and Izzie posing for another shot at the top of the pillar.


And here's my beautiful wife showing off her squinty face for the sun.


After our pictures at the top we hunted for the geocache at the top, but couldn't find it. As we headed down we stopped by Clark's signature that he carved into the rock so that Grannie could check it out. After all, that's what makes Pompey's Pillar so cool to see. Then we went for a walk around the park to look for some more caches and to see the sights. Here we are throwing rocks into the Yellowstone River for a few minutes.


While searching for a geocache in the Pompey's Pillar area we happened to find some molting cicada bugs. I've never seen this process happen, and I found it quite amazing. Here's a couple of during and one after shot of the process.




Here's Izzie and Grannie looking at one that they picked up with a stick.


As we headed back to the visitor center we paused for a break in the shade just outside. Izzie found something to jump off of, and I managed to catch the action. Check out the concentration face. Either that or she's determined in her mind that she can fly.


And another just for the fun of it.


Remember this photo from our original visit to Pompey's Pillar? Well, we took another one with Grannie this time for the fun of it.


And that was the end of our daily adventure. We hung out, relaxed and went to the park with Grannie for the remainder of her stay, and just generally had fun.

Thanks for visiting us Grannie! We love you.