Marty and Vicky's Trip West

We arrived in the Tetons on Wednesday afternoon, entering on the eastern entrance to the park. The Grand Teton National Park is a southern gateway to the main attraction to the north, Yellowstone. It's a smaller park than Yellowstone, and completely different in character. While Yellowstone offers vistas of mountains and lakes like Grand Teton, its main attraction is more geothermal in nature. The Tetons give you views of serene lakes with incredibly jagged peaks that seem to pop up from the surrounding flatter landscape. For people heading to Yellowstone, Grand Teton is often a drive-through photo op session. For us, it was nice to stay there for a day and take it in a bit more. For those with a more rugged inclination, the park offers challenging hikes into the mountains and canyons that you can see from the road. On our way to the southeast side of the park, we stopped to take pictures of the mountains, including some snaps at the same spot where Ansel Adams had taken his most f...

Casper, Wyoming on the North Platte River, is a local commerce hub, and the second largest city in Wyoming, with a population of about 60,000. To this Easterner living in a small city in central Pennsylvania, Casper is a small town. Wyoming is a huge state, about twice the size of Pennsylvania, but very sparsely populated. Its population density is the least of the lower 48, by a lot. Most of the far flung settlements we passed through had populations well below 1,000. We left Casper on Wednesday to drive west across most of Wyoming, then up north to the Grand Tetons. There are a lot of mountain ranges in Wyoming, but most of our trip was through vast basins of high prairie. Rolling hills, short grasses, and lots of sagebrush. Every so often you'll see a few cattle grazing in this vast landscape. Once in a while, a ranch house shaded by a few cottonwood trees. Otherwise, the landscape is pretty treeless. Every so often, you'll pass an oil field, or maybe some isolated drills.  ...

We left our campsite near Deadwood on Tuesday morning, saw Devil's Tower in the morning (as reported in Vicky's last post), then headed in to Wyoming to get as many miles in toward our next major destination as possible. We'd originally planned to stay at Keyhole Lake State Park, not too far west of Devil's Tower. But that would have left too long a drive to the Tetons the next day. So we changed our reservation to a KOA outside of Casper Wyoming. This reduced our drive to the Tetons on Wednesday by a few hours. As we left the Black Hills, we headed into the ever varying Wyoming prairie, so different from South Dakota. Just as we started into this landscape, it was lunch time, so we stopped for a curbside sandwich in Moorcroft, Wyoming. By curbside, I mean we stopped the Rig at the side of a residential street a block in from one of the two main streets or town, pulled out the cooler, and made sandwiches. We sat on the curb and ate them.   Right across the street, we no...

We visited two amazing US National Park Service monuments and a private monument in the last two days. On day one it was Mount Rushmore and the Crazy Horse Monument in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The next day we saw Devil's Tower in eastern Wyoming. After two years of social distancing and quarantine, the crowds took some adjustment. Both of the national monuments parks were very crowded. In the Badlands there were a lot of people, but things were spread out and I didn’t feel so congested. At Mount Rushmore and Devil’s Tower there were only a few places to go. Marty and I took the night to decompress and relax. Rushmore is iconic, and there is a nice walk you can take to view the sculpture from all angles very close below it. The pictures here give only a few of the views. Mount Rushmore - The Iconic View Mount Rushmore - The Washington Nasal Hair View Mount Rushmore - Stairs To The Presidents Can we fit any more faces on Mt. Rushmore We visited the Crazy Horse Monument after ...

We spent most of Sunday driving around the Badlands. But first, we went to church, at Our Lady of Victory in Kadoka, South Dakota (the town where we'd done laundry the day before). The church coincidentally has the same name as my parish in State College. It's a much smaller church, and not nearly as well-off as OLV back home. The place is kept going by local ranchers, their church lady wives and a few young families. The pastor, a man who looked in his late 30s and who came to the priesthood later in  life, gave a very good sermon, reflecting the Gospel reading, about the difficulty of handing your life over to Christ "with no back-up plan". Our Lady of Victory in Kadoka, South Dakota In the last post on Badlands, I didn't show much of the landscape. It's truly stunning, and in a way, out of place. In that western part of South Dakota, the dead flat prairie is starting to break into a more rolling (though still pretty flat) landscape. But the Badlands pretty ...

Vicky told me not to write a lot, just post a lot of pictures. And I agree! There was a lot to see today, and we saw it all! Marty and Vicky with the Badlands in the background. First, about last night. After our setting up camp, we went to the gift shop and ran into neighbors, the Friedkens, who live three doors down from us. They had flown out to meet their son in Colorado and were now driving his car back east. Had a great chat.  The wind finally started dying down and we went to a really nice ranger program about the night sky. The Badlands has very clear air, and a great view of the stars. We learned a lot about the summer night sky. By the time the program was over, it was good and dark, dark enough to see the Milky Way. After that, we fumbled our way a quarter-mile back to the Rig in the dark. It got cold. High 40s. Perfect sleeping weather! Today was perfectly clear with relatively light breezes. We drove the paved part of the rim trail through the Badlands. Then continued ...

When we planned our trip west, we front-loaded the journey with long drives. Three 400+ mile drives in a row. The third of these from Andy's place in Central Wisconsin to eastern South Dakota, was the last of these. We drove over 430 miles through southern Wisconsin and Minnesota, and on into South Dakota. I planned on driving half of the way. I didn't anticipate 30 mile an hour gusts of winds with 90 degree temperatures. Marty did most of the driving. I only drove about 100 miles whining all the way. The sun shone and the grasses rippled in the heavy winds. As Marty did most of the driving he chose when we stopped. It was getting time to stop and I saw a sign for the Spam Museum. Marty's sister, Amy brought Marty souvenirs from the Spam museum when she lived in Minnesota so it seemed like a good place to stop. Marty can tell you about the Spam Museum. The town that is home to the Spam Museum is Austin, Minnesota. What a lovely place! There is a main street with lots of flo...

Dad, Mom, and Andy at Andy's house in the woods. We drove from Cincinnati to Madison, Wisconsin in one day, almost 500 miles.. Even at 80 mph, it's a long day on the road. This will be the longest drive on our trip. We have a few more 400+ milers, but it'll mostly be shorter runs.  The drive was mostly easy: no major traffic around the few bigger cities we passed. But it was singularly boring. North central Illinois is unrelievedly flat. Unlike most farm country I've driven through, this stretch had nothing, and I mean nothing but corn. Very little cattle, no soy beans, no orchards, no hills, almost no trees. Just corn, with occasional wind farms, massive silos, and ethanol production plants. It was a relief to get to the relatively rolling flatness of Wisconsin. We spent our first evening in Madison with Andy coming in to visit us from his house in the countryside.. We stayed at a spanking new Avid hotel in Monona, just outside of Madison. Very new hotel. Everything ha...