"Ooh look at me I'm Leo and I have pretty scenery all around me." Okay, buddy, we get it. You graduated college and left the East Coast and now you're seeing a real mountain for the first time. Well, two can play at that game:

I could tell you all--all two of our readers--about the natural beauty of the American West. But the job of a travel writer, which, having already written one post, I can now safely consider myself, is to give you a kind of impressionistic view of a place, as Leo has done for Oregon. And of course being the negative, generally shitty person that I am, I would be lying to you if I said that entering this pristinely tranquil natural sanctuary made me at one with the universe. And I may be shitty, but I'm not a liar.

So I'll give you, both of our readers, a run-down of how my family experienced Yellowstone National Park, in the annoying, condescending, New York way that we actually encountered it. This cartoon is a visual representation of how my family generally experiences the rest of the world:

You've probably heard of Yellowstone's spectacular wildlife, or maybe that it is home to two-thirds of the world's geysers. What they don’t tell you about Yellowstone is that every hotel, restaurant, and store is owned and operated by Xanterra, a corporation that probably wants to cut down the rainforest and almost certainly has more political power than you do.

A waitress at one of Xanterra's wonderful establishments (staying afloat purely by the monopoly that they have imposed on the park) told us that we really ought to try their delicious after dinner mints, almost passing them off as a house speciality. She then pulled out the most standard, average mints one could possibly imagine, fully equipped with "Thank You" printed on the front in a kitschy cursive font, which thankfully Blogger spares its readership of. I actually laughed in this poor waitress's face, fully solidifying the state of Wyoming completely valid disdain for grouchy, self-obsessed and deeply entitled New Yorkers.

The local folk here are quintessentially-provincial types, which has its charms as well as its frustrations. I do not recommend attempting sarcasm. The truth is that the people here are simple in every sense of the word, one tour guide noting that Wyoming has the "smallest per capita population in the country." And here I was assuming that proportion would be one to one.

But as I much as I can mock these residents, in reality my family is as woefully unprepared for their lifestyle as they are for ours. We couldn't make it as wranglers. My mother, for example, upon seeing this guy in the middle of the road, recited our family mantra "Shit shit shit, shit shit, shit shit."

Just a classic clash of cultures. Glad I'm coming home tomorrow. I wonder how I'll fare working on a farm.