Brian Dokko Online

We left for our 13-day road trip on June 28, setting off for Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, Yellowstone National Park, Grand Teton National Park, Arches National Park, Moab UT, Monument Valley, then home via Las Vegas again. We took a pit stop in Vegas on the way out, staying at the (relatively) new Cosmopolitan on the strip. We began celebrating our summer vacation with dinner at Aureole, maybe not one of Charlie Palmer's best restaurants. It's perhaps best known for its "wine angels," thin women in spandex ascending and descending the tower that is their wine cellar.  They must have had the night off, because we never saw them. Food was very good, though we thought the Michelin critics might have been a bit generous in awarding Aureole a star.

In the morning, we drove up to Draper UT to pick up my buddy Greg and his girlfriend, our companions to Yellowstone. None of us had ever been there, and we were all eager to see all the colorful pools, wildlife, and geysers like Old Faithful (pictured above). It's a fascinating landscape, and it looks more like the surface of another planet than a national park. I wish I could have had a birds-eye view, but regrettably, we left the helicopter at home.

Thermal pools near Old Faithful

Grand Prismatic Spring

Pool at the Lower Geyser Basin

Bison, just chillin' in the parking lot area