Color me ambivalent......

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8:15 am - Sunday - August 20th - 47º F, humidity 76%, wind 1 mph out of the south southeast.....forecast high for Gardiner, MT is 80º F, and 75º F in Mammoth Hot Springs, WY.  'We' have been on pins and needles (well, some of us) wondering if we will be getting a clear sky day for the solar eclipse on Monday, and based on today's forecast for Mammoth Hot Springs (Gardiner, too) we will have clear skies, so we've got that going for us......

......I hate to admit this, but I am somewhat ambivalent about the eclipse, and that is usually the case for me when there is any event where everyone around me is sort of 'gaga' way in advance about it.....whatever 'it' may happen to be at the time.  I don't like being a 'follower', or a 'joiner'.  It always seems to me that when events such as the upcoming solar eclipse actually happen the hype always exceeds the actual event.  I know I'll feel kind of goofy tomorrow putting on my cardboard solar eclipse glasses to watch a 2 minute event, but I'll do it anyway, and then get on with my day.  That being said, we did see a partial eclipse of the sun a few years ago when we were spending a few days at Craters of the Moon in Idaho.....I wrote about that here.  I think I got more excited about that, because I didn't even know there was going to be one until a few minutes before it happened.  Maybe it's just all the hype in advance that wears me down, and causes me to lose interest.  Anyway, color me ambivalent 24 hours before the 'SE'.......

Saturday was quite the busy day.....our store did over $31,000 in sales, and I was not surprised to hear the report at the end of the night......things were crazy in the 'Fountain'....crazy I say.  We haven't seen consecutive $30,000+ days since the 4th of July week.  We had approximately 40 hot dogs/bratwursts on the two 'rollers' when I came on duty at 1:30 pm.....the rollers were maxed out capacity wise....within minutes of my arrival three large tour buses disgorge their human cargoes in front of the General Store, and within 35 minutes of that the rollers were empty, and we were scrambling to heat up more dogs using the microwave to keep up with demand.  In that span of time I heated up approximately 40 pretzels in addition to the 18 we already had in the display case when the buses arrived.  When the three busloads of people finally vacated the store about 45 minutes after they arrived we all felt like we had been hit by the proverbial bus.....no, actually three proverbial buses!  Our work area was in shambles so we spent the next 30 minutes cleaning and straightening.  The rest of the day never got that bad again, but the flow of customers was steady.  I would say 50% of our customers Saturday were from France.

I don't recall mentioning this before....please correct me if I am wrong.....but this coming week, because of the SE crowds expected (and they have already materialized) we have been asked to give up one of our off days, so we will be working 6 consecutive days this week (Tuesday through Sunday) to help keep the General Store adequately staffed.  We will have 4 'CLOSE' shifts during that span with a 'MID2' and 'MID1' thrown in to break it up.....I'm already feeling tired just thinking about it.  We will, however, get our usual one day of hiking in on Monday.

We were in the VW by 9:40 pm cruising down the Gardiner River Gorge and home by 9:55 pm.  Another YNP day in the books.....thanks for stopping by!

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