We drove a few miles to the western start of the road that runs a few miles from where I grew up, I-94. Then we turned south to finish up Montana. We passed the location of Custer's defeat. Soon we crossed the border into Wyoming. Wyoming is a gorgeous state. The roads in some parts are red:
And the gas was only $2.99 (compared to $3.09 in Montana and $3.03 in Idaho). The visitor center was only 29 degrees, but we froze our fingers trying to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
We weren't in Wyoming long (relatively speaking). Soon we crossed into South Dakota. The first thing I noticed was that the flags were flying at half-staff. Numerous attempts to find a radio station worth listening to (i.e. not Country, not Oldies, not Jesus) to hear the news to find who died were fruitless.
When we got to Rapid City, we went south to find Mount Rushmore. Along the way, there were many many tacky tourist attractions targetted to small boys. I theorized that the city is called Rapid City because if you take an 8 year old boy there, your money will disappear rapidly. I was wondering as we went up, if I would find the heads to be smaller than I expect, larger than I expect, or about the same size I expect. I think they were a bit smaller than I expected, but we were also much closer to them than I expected. We were pretty much right under them. In fact, it looked to be a 20 minute hike to the top. The bad part was that they charge $10 to park even though I have a National Parks Pass.
Elena claims we had a near death experience as we headed back to I-90. We came up to this intersection:
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Well, just as we got there, the train signal started going. We looked to the right and a train was slowly lumbering toward us. Since we had just seen several very very long coal trains, we weren't happy about the notion of being trapped watching a slow coal train go by. So I told Elena to punch it, and we sped through the intersection. Sounds dramatic, until I admit that about 5 cars behind us got through too. :-)
So we started to head east again. Elena drove for a couple of hours, I drove for an hour, and we crossed the Mountain/Central time zone. As soon as we crossed that and advanced the hour, we decided to stop for the night since it was about 6:30. City? Murdo (pop: 553). We stopped at a Best Western. Although it is part of the chain, it's not a Best Western like we all know--but the kind of Best Western found in a city with a population of 500. $53 for a night for 2 of us. Elena and I have been self catering by going to the grocery store to get food and wine. But when we squeaked into the (only) grocery store seconds before closing time (7pm) we found that they had no deli or hot food. The whole grocery store was about the size of a large convenience store. I found the liquor section. No real wine in 750ml bottles except some Lambrusco. The beer selection was basically the 4 main beers. They had some coolers and a hard liquor section. One box of Franzia graced their fridge.
So we decided to just go out to one of the three restaurants in town. We chose The Buffalo. I think the only patrons were the other guests at the hotels. Elena had a Salisbury steak and I had a nice rib eye. We pounced on the salad bar for beets and hot peppers besides the soup and salad. Dinner came with ice cream.
So here I am back in the hotel about to go to sleep and get ready to go east again.
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