Just yesterday, we returned from this year’s “big” vacation, an 8-day trip to Grand Teton National Park and Yellowstone National Park. A vacation so out-of-the-norm for me, that I knew I needed to get started on the blog recaps right away, so that I wouldn’t forget a thing. 🙂 I’ll be splitting this review into multiple parts:
- Part 1: Getting to Wyoming
- Part 2: Jackson, Wyoming and Grand Teton National Park
- Part 3: Yellowstone National Park: Lodges, and Geysers, and Bears, oh my!
- Part 4: Yellowstone National Park: Canyons, Canyons Everywhere
- Part 5: Animal Spotting in Yellowstone and Grand Teton
- Part 6: 10 Tips for Staying at a Yellowstone National Park Lodge
This first part is all about getting ourselves to the parks proper. So, let’s kick things off with how we got there. Driving from Texas would have taken up too many of our precious vacation days, so we knew we’d need to fly. And thanks to our handy-dandy Southwest Companion Pass and a passel of Southwest points earned through work travel and credit card spend, we knew that if we could fly on Southwest, our flights would be free.
That presented one logistical difficulty, though: Southwest doesn’t fly to any of the airports immediately near Yellowstone (like Bozeman, MT or West Yellowstone, ID) nor to the Jackson Hole, Wyoming airport in Grand Teton proper. As such, I looked a little further afield and found that the closest airports serviced by Southwest included Salt Lake City, UT; Boise, ID; or Denver, CO. Given that Salt Lake City had the shortest driving time to Jackson, Wyoming, we picked it as our winner and booked our free flights.
Also, due to the size and nature of the parks in question, we knew we’d also be needing a rental car. I recently discussed three ways you can potentially save on your rental car fees, and today I’ll add one more: if you work for a large company, see if they have any employee discount programs. For this trip, a rate I qualified for through my employer discount program beat all my standard booking tricks — 8 days in a Buick Enclave came out to $328 out of pocket for us on this trip, which breaks down to just $41 a day.
Finally, as our flight into Salt Lake City didn’t land until the afternoon, we decided to stay one night in Utah before making the drive up through Idaho to Wyoming – which also meant that we needed a one-night hotel stay. Luckily, thanks to points earned through our Starwood American Express, I had the 7,000 points needed to reserve a free room in the Sheraton Salt Lake. Given that rooms usually go for around $180/night, this was a great use of my points, giving me a value of 2.6 cents per point.
Even better, shortly after reserving my standard room with points, I received an email confirmation that featured an upgrade offer — for just $30 I could upgrade us to a Club Level room that came with free breakfast, happy hour, coffee, water bottles, etc. Knowing that we’d easily spend that much on breakfast and water for our drive alone, I went ahead and requested the offer.
But the Sheraton Salt Lake did me one better: noting that I had mentioned in my reservation that this was our big anniversary trip for the year, the manager reached out via email to inform me she’d gone ahead and upgraded us to a club level room for free! Just goes to show you that SPG is still one brand that really does value its loyal customers. Given that we each enjoyed a glass of wine in the Club ($15 value), breakfast in the Club ($30 value), and went through about 3 bottles of water each ($6 value); we enjoyed at least $50 of benefits thanks to this upgrade.
The hotel itself was somewhat dated, but still nice and very conveniently located in downtown Salt Lake City. We were able to walk over to catch a glimpse of the famed Mormon Temple (very nice exterior, though we couldn’t go inside), to dinner at a tapas restaurant (too mediocre to mention, sadly) and our post-dinner entertainment: a laser-light show at the Clark Planetarium.
So, if you’re keeping track, so far we managed to get our flights for free, 1 night hotel stay for free, and deep discounts on our rental car. Not too shabby!
The next day we were up bright and early to get on the road. Salt Lake City, Utah to Jackson, Wyoming is roughly a 4.5 hour drive, but we decided to break it into sections with some fun pit stops along the way.
First up, we detoured slightly off the highway to discover Lava Hot Springs, Idaho, where a naturally-heated hot spring feeds 5 natural, soft gravel lined pools at the Lava Hot Springs Hot Pools. This was a great attraction, though admittedly, would have been even better if the outdoor temperatures were in the 50s-60s, instead of the high 70s as it was on the day of our visit.
Secondly, just a little way down the road in Soda Springs, Idaho, we stopped for lunch at the Geyser View Restaurant, an old-fashioned diner that served one heckuva Reuben sandwich, not to mention burgers, chicken fried steak, etc. Just behind the eponymous restaurant was the Soda Springs Geyser, which is even MORE faithful than Ol’ Faithful and goes off every hour, on the hour.
This was a fantastic first geyser to start off our tour of this thermal-feature laden area of the country (and in fact, I actually found it way more impressive than Old Faithful…but more on that later!) Partially this was because we got to be so close, and the lack of many other tourists didn’t hurt either!
Finally, after Soda Springs, we completed the remaining 2.5 hours of the drive, and rolled into our B&B in Jackson, Wyoming just before dinner time. I’ll tell you more about Jackson and our time in Grand Teton in my next blog, so stay tuned!
