Chronicles of Wrennie-D I S A S T E R S T R I K E S

Blogging from my car in Wyoming, the land of no cell service. And I think I’ve seen three gas stations in the past two and a half hours. It feels bigger and emptier than South Dakota did, which is really, really impressive. Rammstein, by the way, makes good travel music here. Something about the echoy background beats their songs have. Evidently this is one of the least populated states in the nation, and most of them appear to live in nice trailers and own lots of horses.

I’ve seen one local license plate here. Most of them have been from Cali, Wa, S Dakota, and one from Jersey and Pennsylvania, respectively. We waved at them, since they were in the long haul, like us, and even though my tags say from MO, I drove here from DC, baby.

Give it to me baby, say the Offspring.

My iPod has been dead on with its music choices, as usual. (Remember Lon Lon Ranch from a few posts back?) It has managed to sync up practically the entire day with only the slightest bit of help from me.

It started this morning when we breakfasted on Arby’s (the fact that I can eat it without getting sick makes me wonder about their claims to serving real roast beef…) and drove down highway 16 to get to Rushmore. On the way there we decided to stop by Bear Country USA, which is a drive-thru wildlife park set back in the hills. I have a lot of pictures because the animals were active and quite unafraid of the car, but since there were wolves and bears it was forbidden to roll down the window, so I have no idea if they will turn out. So, I’ll describe the highlights.

1) In the Arctic Wolf section, I had selected Enya to play on shuffle, and we listened to a song about hiding in the grass while looking for the wolves in a large hilly field. Found one asleep by a rock, flicking his ears.

2) Found a rather amusing-looking sheep in another section, right past the goat feed station. A lot of goats were there, and the kids had hopped into the troughs and were eating lying down with ears atwitch

3)Enya’s “Wild Child” started playing as soon as we entered the wolf and black bear section. They were filling a pond to our left, and three bears were flopped in it, enjoying what water there was already, while four wolves were playing with the jet of water coming from the filling spout. They were leaping around, pawing, and biting at the water jet. Then they’r run off and go race each other before coming back and doing it all again.

4) As we left through the Bison area, a large male stood at the gate exit and stared us down as we left. He had really bad allergies and a lovely afro and big, warm eyes.

After that we drove off to Rushmore and listened to Beethoven through the Black Hills. BEST IDEA EVER. Ode to joy played as we left the trees and entered the hills, and Pastorale played as we were driving in and out of a small thunderstorm. I don’t have a picture of the full Rushmore face, but I have a really awesome shot of Washington’s profile.

Next we drove through the national park proper and took the scenic route through a lot of little mountain towns and up into a canyon before ending and having lunch in Spearfish. Had a lot of fun discussing geology during the drive. Spent most of it in silence because everything was so astoundingly pretty.

After that we headed into Wyoming and headed off to Devil’s Tower with a thunderstorm on our tails. It ended up south of us, so we had a nice sunny drive through the middle of nowhere up towards the tower. Once we’d had our fill of the scenery we drove off down highway 14 and picked 90 back up at Gillette. I think we’re going to stop somewhere in Montana tonight, possibly in Billings. I’ll finish this post then.


::EDIT::

We've been a bit held back.

Luckily, this happened near a town, in a place that had cell service.

So I can't whine about it too much, considering what the rest of Wyoming was like.

And we're not too far behind. Should be in/near Spokane by tomorrow.

But, we ordered a lot of room service, anyway. Having a tire explode while going 80 on a highway is a little...stressful.