The Night Before Yellowstone 出发去黄石的前一晚

The Night Before Yellowstone

Tomorrow, my brother Henry and I are finally heading to Yellowstone, and I am so, so excited that I can barely fall asleep! We’re going for seven whole days, and I already mapped out everything we’re going to do in an earlier diary. We leave for the airport at 8 o’clock tomorrow morning, and I just know there’ll be tons of people since it’s summer break.

Today was also the last day of school for 4th grade. It felt super long at first, but it actually turned out to be a lot of fun. We got to watch a movie called Hoppers which is about a girl who wants to protect nature but accidentally disturbs it instead. I’d already seen it before, but it was still really fun. For lunch I had pepperoni pizza baked inside bread, and I even got to try their special very-berry juice, mango pudding, and free ice cream — everything was so yummy. My teacher gave me four Jolly Ranchers instead of three because I was behaving so well!

Something funny happened too — my friend Ethan accidentally left his backpack in our car and thought he’d lost it. My mom told him it had been with us all along, so we returned it to his grandma, and Ethan showed up to school with no backpack. After school, my brother and I also gave our 3D-printed pet fish and mushroom to the owner of Happy Hippo, the 3D printing studio. The mushroom was mine and the fish was my brother’s. And don’t worry — my bearded dragon, Spiky, is being taken care of too. He’s spiky and lazy during the day, but in the afternoons he loves to play with me. A friend is going to feed him while we’re away. Having a pet is actually really great.

Right now we’re still packing, and there are a few last details to figure out, but that’s okay — we’ll sort it out later. Since there’s barely any Wi-Fi in a national park, we even had to bring our own Starlink, so I’m downloading a bunch of movies and Netflix shows tonight. I really don’t want to get bored on the plane!

One of the coolest things tonight was our air fryer. At first I wasn’t excited about it because I figured it couldn’t do much, but I was totally wrong. We made chicken nuggets in it, and they came out super crispy — just like the fast-food kind, not soft and mushy like the microwave ones. Now it feels like we have unlimited nuggets and never have to run to McDonald’s again. I ended up liking the air fryer a lot.

Last but not least, I had the best time opening a coconut that Mom and I bought at Whole Foods. At first I couldn’t crack it, but then I remembered something my science teacher taught me: at one end of a coconut there are three little “eyes” that are much weaker than the rest of the shell. You poke around with a chopstick (a metal one works best — it makes a clink sound on the table, which means it’s strong enough not to bend) until you find the soft spot. Then you poke in a straw, and here’s the trick — you need two holes, one to let air in and one to let air out. At first I only made one hole and it didn’t work, but once I poked a second hole, the air rushed in and the juice came pouring out! I drank as fast as I could, even though some spilled, and I helped Mom clean it up after.

Did you know a coconut is actually its own seed? There’s no separate seed inside — the whole coconut is the seed, and the sweet liquid inside is its nutrition. It’s such a cool fun fact, and I almost couldn’t believe a coconut had a weak spot until I tried it myself. I had such a fun day today, and I really wish I could do it all over again — but for now, I’d better get a good night’s sleep for our big trip!