A wise wife once said...

“No cross country-trip is complete without a speeding ticket.” I (Chris) would like to send a big shout out to the Deputy Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane from Wapiti County. I got pulled over in the middle of nowhere… let me repeat… nowhere, for doing 81 in a 65. Compared to Georgia or D.C. area tickets, this one was a bargain I thought… $88 and I didn’t even have to pay on the spot. He gave me a pre-addressed envelope to mail my check… Wyoming people are nice. He spared me the “do you know the speed-limit?” bit, I spared him the “my cruise-control must be broken” bit and we were on our way.

For all you cat lovers out there, Fresh-step cat liter is made 10 miles from where I got my ticket... from the looks of the ground and surrounding areas, I think they scoop it up and put it in the bag directly from the ground outside the factory… the sun bakes the ground to a crisp there and it looks like cat liter… the town looks like a giant litter box.

Wyoming - gap in updates

Sorry summeroff2007 readers for the large gap in posts, but there is absolutely no wi-fi or broadband cell service in most of Wyoming or Yellowstone National Park… business idea anyone? We just found some in Jackson, Wyoming so read on.

Custer State Park, Custer SD

Sadly, since we are on our trip we had to miss a wedding this weekend for two good friends of ours, Ben Custer and Shannon Byrne. As luck would have it however, we spent the entire weekend in Custer, South Dakota so we were sort of there in spirit.

Custer State Park should be a national park, it is amazing. The infrastructure and facilities are great and the sites to see are even better. We saw Mount Rushmore, a classic tourist attraction and while the sculpture of the faces in the rock is impressive, we found much more delight from the natural scenery in the park. On Saturday we drove a winding road up to about 6000 feet and spent the morning hiking through granite gorges, hardwood forests and a beautiful alpine lake called Sylvan Lake. That evening we went on the park’s nature drive (40 mile loop) and visited with about 300 of the park’s 1500 free-roaming Buffalo in the southern grassland portion. Once there were millions roaming the plains and then by the turn of the century we had killed all but 500 of them on the entire continent. What a perfect example of how efficient and extremely destructive/wasteful of our resources that we Americans can be.

We came over a hill and there was a herd of about 300 standing around the road. We rolled up and took about 50 pictures. They burped and moo’ed and ran around and did buffalo things… it will end up being a highlight of the trip for both of us.

This morning we got up and did a run around another lake that our campsite was by. When people tell you it is harder to workout or run/hike at altitude, believe them. Sara and I ran for about 30 minutes over some winding medium hills and were exhausted… it feels like you are pulling a bag of bricks.

Off to Yellowstone in Wyoming this week. We stopped in at Flying J truck stop to update this… the only internet within two hundred miles, but they do have a Starbucks in Gillette WY, so it is on the map by most people’s standards.

The Badlands – Western SD

We made it to our first “real” national park today, the Badlands. The weather has been relatively nice over the past few days, mostly in the mid to high 80’s, but it was HOT in the Badlands.

The landscape began to change as we got closer to the park, and the rock structures of the Badlands were a stark contrast to the miles and miles of open farmland we had spent the past day in.

We had planned on camping in the park that night, but as we drove through and took in the sights, while it was beautiful, we weren’t intrigued by any of the short hikes available in the park. So we did the RV tour, parked at the overlooks, took some pictures, marveled at how soft the stone seemed as we crawled out on some ledges to get a better view, and laughed at the people in the campground with no trees for shelter or shade in the 90-degree heat. After that, we continued our trip west for the night to Custer State Park