Yellowstone

It may seem a bit odd to visit Yellowstone in the middle of a sailing trip around the Caribbean and Bahamas, but it made sense in a lot of ways to continue exploring the US while Chris was sailing back to Europe and you couldn’t have much more of a contrast to the rest of our trip than Yellowstone.

A big contrast was the temperature. When I’d researched what clothes to pack, I’d looked at the current daily temperatures and been pleasantly surprised at the high thirties, shocked at the forties and had a dawning realisation by the fifties that we were talking Farenheit. It’s cold up there and we found out when we were planning our visit that many of the Ranger-led activities weren’t scheduled to start till we got there in early June – and were in fact postponed because of the weather.

And then there was the substitution of green forest for blue sea, enormously high, snow clad peaks for white sand beaches, and large mammals for smaller fish.

But the underlying themes are the same: what an incredible and beautiful world we live in, how diverse, complex and fragile the ecosystems and how privileged we’ve been to see even such a small part of it.