before i forget - can you even imagine living in this house? welcome to the badlands.
so. crowded. impressive, and worth it, but be prepared for crowds. lots and lots of crowds. keystone, south dakota (the closest town to rushmore) is also ridiculously crowded on the last sunday of july. who would've guessed?
art alley! definitely one of the cooler parts of rapid city.
well, probably those who knew that next week is the sturgis bike rally.
in any case, by the time i found a parking spot, waded through tourists and picture-takers to take my own pictures, wandered around the sculpture studio, and told many "most bad-ass president" jokes to myself, it was lunch time and i was already behind schedule. no visits to the reptile palace or crazy horse monument for ericaleigh. the cosmos mystery attraction tempted me, momentarily, but i resisted and quickly got myself back on I-90 headed toward wyoming!
by time i got to wyoming and the info center near sundance, it was time to start thinking about which direction i should go next: stay on I-90 up to billings, before heading back down to yellowstone? or head straight across wyoming on smaller, less populated roads. i'd originally wanted to go across wyoming, but wasn't convinced - i'm by myself, in a veryvery full car. do i want to put myself in places that have little cell access and not many people around? well, after a chat with the info lady, she convinced me to take hwy 16 west across wyoming. apparently, it's one of the most scenic routes in the country - and the easiest of the cross-wyoming routes to yellowstone.
ok, so there were those magic words again - scenic route! and, boy, they aren't kidding. they're not kidding about those mountains, either - poor maddie DEFINITELY had a workout today. interesting fact about maddie: she has a semi-automatic transmission, so if you want, you can manually tell the transmission when to change gears. this means you have to see what gear you're in- so there's a little number on the dash that i generally ignore. now, i don't ever use this particular feature - but when you're climbing the big horn mountains in a very full car, and maddie suddenly jumps to 2nd gear, oh boy. that was unexpected. i have a feeling i have a couple days of frantically watching the little gear number and praying that maddie won't hate me too much when we get to seattle.
oh, and here's the pretty from big horn national forest:
you can JUST see the mountains...
some other thoughts from today's drive:
1. western south dakota and eastern wyoming are the south australia of the united states. seriously.
2. beware the butterflies in south dakota. most people probably fear collisions with other, larger, more toothy wildlife, but i've hit at least a dozen butterflies in the last two days. they stick to the windshield and get caught in the wipers. it's super sad. so beware the butterflies.
3. there's a hell of a lot of bugs in general - many of them are squashed on the front of my car, but all the rest of them i think are out to get me. i think a couple of them managed to steal into the car and had a very, very delicious afternoon of feasting on my legs. i hope they are in pain from their binge.
2 comments:
OMG- Are you really only 500 miles away?! Eagerly awaiting your arrival in Seattle :)
just make sure you get those little buggers washed off sooner rather than later. as i have discovered over the years, the longer they stay on, the less likely it is they'll come off. ever. i like to call the color of my car "speckled green" now.
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