If This Happened When I was Nine, This Would Have Been My Favorite Part of the Trip

One thing you need to know about me is that I love animals. And not just puppies and kittens, but all animals (well, not snakes, but who DOES love snakes?? Crazy people, that's who). So the highlight of my trip to Yellowstone in June was all the wildlife sightings. A later post will be dedicated more to the wildlife I saw in the park, but this post is about a kind that's a little more...close to home.



Let me preface this story by saying that we stayed in an historic hotel. The Old Faithful Inn was built in 1904. It remains true to form and the rooms in the older part of the hotel (we stayed in the section that was added in 1914) don't even have private bathrooms in the rooms. You have to walk down the hall to use the restroom or take a shower. There was NO WAY I was re-living that part of college life, so I insisted on staying in the newer addition. It's really cool that the inside and outside of the hotel is made of real logs, so it's very rustic.



We stayed at this hotel for three nights, and on the third night we had a delicious late dinner at the restaurant in the hotel. Afterwards, we went up to the terrace to watch Old Faithful go off one last time before bed. Sounds blissfully peaceful, right? Really it was because this hotel DID NOT HAVE TV. At all. No television! Crazy, huh? So I had to resort to enjoying nature and crap.

My mom got to the room first, and when I walked in I heard my mom shriek about some creature moving around on the floor. Figuring it was a roach or something, I was pretty disgusted. Then I laid eyes on the fuzzy gray creature and realized that it was a mouse.

I am from Texas. We don't get mouses in our houses (or mice in our hice). We get ants, roaches and spiders in our homes, but no mice. We had a squirrel in our wall once, and that had previously been my closest encounter with the rodent kind.

My first reaction was to GET IT OUT OF MY HOTEL ROOM! But then I looked it again and the little vermin melted my heart with his itty bitty ears and shiny, beady eyes. I couldn't call the hotel staff and let them kill it. I knew we had to capture him and set him free, so we got some cheerios and a plastic cup and lured the adorable little rodent into our trap.



Cute huh? It was actually my mom who thought of the cup, so I let her claim credit for the capture.




I, on the other hand, got the honor of carrying the little mouse (who I named Chester) downstairs. In a clear plastic cup. Past fellow hotel patrons. To let him outside. I freed Chester near a nice little tree so that he might life a full and happy life, frolicking in the shade with his little mouse friends. I'm SURE he didn't get eaten by a hawk or anything.