Through South Dakota, to Iowa and Nebraska

South Dakota has a lot of places to visit, but the most notable are Mount Rushmore, Wall Drug, Devils Tower, and the Mitchell Corn Palace. Mt. Rushmore needs no comment. Not far off the highway and spectacular. Abe Lincoln is still there to talk to and have a photo op if desired. Wall Drug is not as well known unless you know someone who has been there, or if you have. It is an all purpose mall that occupies a full city block including all four corners. It started in 1939 in Wall, SD and almost went under after five years of trying to survive. Then the wife of the owner suggested that since Mt. Rushmore had been finished and folks were still driving past Wall to get there, that they needed something to get them to stop. Her idea was ice water. Air conditioners had not come along yet, and it was hot and dry in the summer. They had ice and lots of water. They placed signs along the highway much like the Burma Shave signs in that day saying that they had free ice water, and ice cream, and cola, etc. The first summer they had all they could handle. The next summer they had to hire 8 girls to help out. Today, Bill the son, has expanded the place even more and they still have free ice water, and 5 cent coffee. It is a tourist trap of the first order which draws up to 2200 visitors a day. All that a mall has, all the souvenirs you could want, and fantastic food, I had a roast beef sandwich which was the best ever, gravy better than on any other I have had. We traveled this road before on a trip out west but Wall Drug is even better than then. On to Devils tower which was the place the space ship landed in the movie, "Close Encounters", and to Mitchell with it's own claim to fame in the Corn Palace. They use real corn cobs to decorate the outside and inside of the place. They grow every variation there is for the palace. Then I drove south on I 29 and past Omaha Nebraska to my present camping spot almost on the line between Iowa and Nebraska. Tomorrow I will try to drive to my oldest daughters house northwest of St. Louis in Wentzville, then to my parents in Cape Girardeau, MO, then home. This will not end this blog though. I have many reflections of problems and ideas for the future trips that are sure to come, and ways to make a living by traveling, etc. I have ignited a desire to see the world in our son David. Julie and Jacki have already traveled a bit , but David was limited the the trip to the Petrified forest, The Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, and across South Dakota when he was 16. This was a new experience for both of us and we both know that we can travel and make a living if one has a desire to do so. Maybe I have finally found out what I want to do when I grow up, and maybe David too once he finishes all the school he has planned, maybe culminating with becoming a professor at a university.

Glacier National Park on Independance Day

aka, Waterton Glacier International Peace Park. Seems that since the US and Canada have always had peaceful relations, the UN named the Canadian park north of Glacier and Glacier as a peace park. Due to the Fourth of July weekend, I camped at Flathead Lake about 60 miles from the park as it was as close as I could get into a campground. It was a very scenic area. Once in the park, the trip up "Going to the Sun Road" is narrow and also under construction. It is 52 miles of winding road with cutbacks, and to add to that they are doing construction on it. The trip took 2 and a half hours to reach the other side. They have added buses which I suspect will soon, when the construction is done, replace individual car traffic in the park as has been done in The Grand Canyon and Denali in Alaska. Once I reached the summit of 6600 feet, I continued all the way to the East entrance. The road was so tough, for my truck, the limited length to get onto the road was 20' and the truck is 19.5', that I decided to take the 120 mile trip around the park to get back. It was also raining the entire time at the higher elevations. It took me three hours to make the also rugged trip around. That evening I realized that my phone was missing. I had texted David as I entered, and later saw that I had no service up on the Road. Once I got out of the park, I decided to check for service again, and no phone. I searched the truck as it had fallen out of my pocket before and landed in a compartment in the truck door. Also at times I left it on the console. It was nowhere to be found. As I drove back to the camper, I drove through one small town and there was a bottle rocket war going on across the highway. It sounded like the truck got hit a few times. Then in Hungry Horse, the entire town was out and others too. The kids were shooting fireworks and the adults were mostly at the tavern but some were in lawn chairs along the highway too. I stopped and watched a while and took some photos, then left before it was dark enough for the town fireworks to start. I was wondering what had happened to my phone. I had left messages at the park to email me if they found my phone. I never received an email from the park but when I got to the campground, my computer had messages from David, Melissa and my dad. They had all received calls from the park saying that my phone had been turned in. The next morning I drove back to Glacier and had to travel the Going to the Sun Road again to get to the east entrance where my phone had been turned in. The day was better than the previous day but traffic was heavier on Monday than on the Fourth of July. I got to the east entrance and identified my phone and signed the necessary paper work and then had to decide whether to drive the long way again or just go back on Going to the Sun Road. I decided to go back through the park and was glad I did. I had dinner at a restaurant and enjoyed the evening as another day was gone. The next morning I left Glacier which is a name which needs to be changed to Glacier Lakes National Park as the remaining Jackson Glacier in the park is an 11 mile hike to what is left of it. Canada's park is Waterton Lakes National Park so they are ahead of us in the naming process.

I left on the road toward home again and the trip was very enjoyable around the Flathead Lake. On the south end was a beautiful town named Polson. If not for the winters, it would be a great place to live. There was a boat pulling kids on a tube in what had to be very cold water, but I suppose they get used to it here. I continued south to Interstate 90, the longest coast to coast highway in the US, probably due to the mountains and cities it connects. Somewhere between Boseman and Billings, I reconnected with bugs. On the windshield first, the when I drove through Billings and stopped at a McDonalds for a late lunch and to use the Internet for a bit , flies. Billings is where Melissa spent a year as an Americorps volunteer while getting away from the empty nest. She chose a good place as it is a lot like a smaller version of Memphis. She made some good friends there and traveled back to visit them once and again for the wedding of the daughter of one of the friends. It was tempting to try to find some of them, but they were her friends, as I was home working then and now she is home working as I travel through her town for a year. Life takes some interesting turn as it passes... Next, on to South Dakota for a day trip.

Return to Washington and on to Montana.

We arrived in Bellingham Friday a week ago in the early morning. We drove from Bellingham 100 miles down to Seattle to visit the Space Needle and David wanted to visit a brewery in the university area. David also wanted to see where Starbucks got it's start, but the streets were so narrow and the pedestrian and vehicle traffic so heavy that we decided to just drive past it and head back to my cousin Janet's house. She has a home on her daughter and son in law's 5 acres that they share with three horses, four dogs, and three cats, if I counted correctly. Oh, also two great children. We had planned to leave there sooner than we did, but I had work to do on the camper, and David wanted to go back to Seattle to visit Washington University with a friend he met on the ferry, so we stayed longer. We went back to a place Janet took us to on the way to Alaska that has fresh mussels from a farm in the bay and visited a fifties "joint" in the mountains which had a jukebox that still works, but the 45s are scratched up, and visited Deception Falls nearby. I took a few videos of the falls, but am having trouble getting them to upload. Then David received information that he needed to get back to Knoxville soon for an interview that would lock up graduate school, so I took him back to Seattle to catch a flight to St. Louis to visit my oldest daughter Jacki, and Melissa drove there today to take him back to Collierville to get his car by way of visiting my parents in Cape Girardeau. Once he gets his car, he will drive to Knoxville for his interview.
So I drove across Washington yesterday, and into Montana. Since David wasn't along I drove till dark which left me in the middle of nowhere in Montana. I spent the night in a rest area on I 90. When I stopped it was empty, when I woke up this morning, it was full of trucks and a few campers. By the time I left at nine, it was empty again. I slept with bear spray and a bit of hardware by my pillow, so I slept soundly.
Somewhere along the way I realized that this is the July 4th holiday weekend, and I could not reach David by phone, so I left a voice mail that I needed campground help. He sent me the number for Glacier National Park and I found that their campgrounds were full, but they had no camper hook ups anyway. Then I used my GPS to locate RV parks and they were all full within 60 miles of the park. So here I sit by myself with nothing to do except to work on uploading photos on a very slow Internet connection and updating this finally. Tomorrow I will drive into Glacier National Park and look around and try to decide whether to drive into Canada to see more glaciers or if it is worth the drive. A camper in DC told us that Canada has some of the most spectacular glaciers north of Glacier, so will likely go there.