Road Trip Day 3

Day 3, we woke up in the Badlands National Park in South Dakota. This place is so incredible, mere words don't do it justice. Neither do these pictures, but they're pretty good nevertheless:





The top picture is a picture of the ladder stairs we climbed to get to the top of Notch Trail, which was a pretty neat, although short, hike. The view at the top is spectacular (the second pic). The third pic shows how vast an expanse these structures are, and it also shows the stripes of different colours, and how many layers there are.

After that, we went on our merry way, to Minnesota. The rest of South Dakota, along with most of Minnesota, was not nearly so captivating as the Badlands, and as such, I actually slept through large portions of both. We stayed in Albert Lea, MN, that night, in a hotel with a shower that had no tub - just a slight dip in the tile floor so the water wouldn't get everywhere. After cleaning up, we had dinner and saw a movie (The Hangover, which was pretty funny).

Road Trip Day 2

We woke up in a beautiful campsite in Montana on Day Two of our journey. I was not well rested, so I tried to sleep in the car. We spent most of this day in Montana, which has a lot of different scenery, so it was not as boring as one might expect sitting in the car all day to be. Here is one of the many interesting sights we saw in Montana:



We followed the I-90 as it made its way across Montana and into Wyoming. In a lot of spots along the highway, the road was paved red. We could see why, since the soil is also red in many spots. Here is a red highway (through a windshield with a bug on it - I did try to avoid taking pictures through the windshield but sometimes that's the only way to capture what you're looking at):



After Wyoming, we found ourselves in South Dakota, home of the iconic Mount Rushmore. We stopped in at Mt Rushmore to check it out. It was a pretty impressive sight. We of course had to pay to park, but as a bonus, we got to keep our parking pass for there for a year. Unfortunately, this is non-transferable, but at least if anyone else is crazy enough to rent the exact same car and take it to Mt Rushmore, they won't have to pay for the parking.



After this, it was getting dark, and we wanted to find our campsite in the Badlands, so we continued on our way. The drive in to the campsite was through Badlands National Park, and we saw quite a lot of wildlife on the roads and not much of anything off the road, since it was completely dark by the time we got there. In flat lands, it gets dark very quickly once the sun sets, whereas where I live, in the mountains, the sun sets but then we have twilight for several hours afterward, as the sun is still technically in the sky - just it gets blocked by the mountains sooner. Anyways, though we couldn't see the landscape, we still knew that the badlands are supposed to be somewhat desert-like, which is why the first of many frogs we saw took us by surprise. Driving along that road became like a game of reverse-frogger - we in the car were trying to dodge the frogs! We also saw a raccoon, an owl, a snake, and plenty of rabbits and mice. Every once in a while, some geographical wonder would pop briefly into view in our headlights, so I was very excited by this wildlife wonderland and its many nifty sights.

Road Trip Day 1

We started a little late because our car rental process took ages. We had an appointment to pick up the car at 10am, but when we got there, there was no person working in the booth, but there was another couple who also had an appointment for 10am to rent their car. It ended up being that the girl who was supposed to be there was instead out on the lot washing cars. Not filling them up with windshield washer fluid or anything like that, but at least they were clean. However, out of three factors that contributed to not making it as far this day as I had intended, this one wasn't too terrible.

Once we got going, say, an hour or so into our journey, it became clear (from looking at a map, finally) that we were in fact going the wrong way and had to re-route ourselves to be going the right way. This is the sort of thing you really have to watch out for, I'm afraid, when you rely on me to direct you anyplace. However, once we were on the right track, the adventure was quite nice. We went through orchards, vineyards and small vacation towns on big lakes. In one town, they have a canal running through town, sort of alongside the highway, and it is customary for locals and tourists alike to slam on their swimsuits, hop on a floaty toy and bob along down the river:



We went through the border without hassle, and continued along our way. We stopped at a pharmacy/grocery/everything store to pick up breakfast foods for the next couple days and then set out to drive until our eyelids wouldn't stay open any more. We went through some very beautiful terrain, including one area that had been ravaged some years ago by a forest fire. The trees at one time had all been burnt, and you could see each tree still had charred remains of bark clinging to them. However, they mostly looked like white posts with the undergrowth coming up around their bases:



We got to Spokane around dark, and then it was my turn to drive. After getting all turned around, my boyfriend had to take over again and get us out of that city, before it was my turn again. We cut across Idaho (took about an hour) and then went into Montana, where, disappointingly, I only made it a little over an hour before having to stop and set up camp, which turned out, at least, to be in a very beautiful campground. That turned out to be the only time I sat behind the wheel this entire trip.

Welcome Home!

I went on a road trip across the United States last week, and while I'm unwinding and preparing some posts about that, I thought I'd start with the last thing first: our garden bounty from when we returned home:

Delicious Treat

This may seem totally weird but once you try it, you won't think so. For kicks I thought I would try Rice Krispies on my vanilla ice cream with blueberries. It is so very good I can't believe I only just thought of it today...

Garden Update

I wish to preface this post with an explanation: there are no June '09 updates to this blog for several reasons, the big one being that my internet provider is dumb and through their own slowness at restoring their service (modem fried, all they had to do was come over and replace it), lost my business. Anyways...

My garden is growing quite nicely:



We take good care of this one, checking every day to make sure the peas are grasping their wire netting, shading the spinach, pouncing on every weed almost as soon as it pops up (this actually has its downfall as we do not actually know what all our crops are supposed to look like to start, and so we have managed to prematurely pick several plants that were supposed to be there...), and watering all the time (as watering laws allow, of course) - even going so far as to set up an irrigation system:



This picture is out of order from the others in this post, but you can see in this picture also that my boyfriend has set up a potato patch (also with irrigation) in the ditch outside our yard. Our strata doesn't mind this because it means he keeps that portion of the ditch under control, more or less.

On the other hand, we also have our strawberry patch, which we do not tend in any way:



This strawberry patch started in the very corner, in a neat little square. It has a mind of its own, however, and is apparently on a mission to take over the whole yard. The only way we take care of this is that there is drip irrigation there now, and we pick the berries whenever we see them (which is all the time!). We are letting them do their own thing because apparently they can take care of themselves, and if all else fails, at least we'll have delicious strawberries every summer.