Surrounded by Majesty

Oct. 14, 2014

It’s pretty easy to find things for which to be grateful while on vacation – it’s vacation, after all! 

I’ve kept vacation journals before, but I’ve never recorded how I feel about what I see and experience. Doing it brings a new dimension to vacation, just as it has done to everyday life. 

I'm grateful for the wonders of nature I've seen the last few days. I've seen these same features many times, but it occurred to me, as I’m sure it does every time I visit (but I forget when I get back home), that I'm witnessing God’s majesty here. I don’t often see or feel that in man-made surroundings. 

As I looked out at the stunning vistas, with dramatic rocky cliffs towering to the sides, a clear rushing river cascading to a dramatic falls, and beyond that, miles and miles of green pine trees stretching to the blue mountains on the horizon, I felt so grateful for all this splendor! 

And today I’m grateful for 60-degree temps, which made visiting all these sights even more pleasurable than yesterday, when it was overcast a lot of the day, 38° and windy, so our hands, noses and ears stung with the cold. 

Walking through the mist from the hot pots made it even colder, and at one particular spot, the steam was so dense our hair was dripping and our eyelashes froze; our coats were covered with frost, and we looked like wet cats.  

 


We headed to Old Faithful at lunchtime and ate our little picnic on a bench near the geyser, shivering and walking around to stay warm. We were blessed with a tender mercy: the geyser went off about 15 minutes after we ate lunch, and the next eruption wasn’t for nearly two more hours! To be at the site I visited so many times as a child and to see it again now through the eyes of my grandson was ... kind of like Christmas. Things that are magical to a kid don't seem quite so magical when you grow up until you become a grandparent. I'm grateful to have felt the magic again!



We walked and hiked and got in and out of the car dozens of times, and we came home tired and happy. 

We built a fire in the fire pit on the riverbank and roasted hot dogs and completely saturated our clothes and hair with campfire smoke. I'm grateful for all the happy family-camping-vacation memories this activity conjured and to share it now with Grandson. 

 

I'm grateful to look out the window and see this for five glorious days in autumn!