Posts Tagged “state signs”

We had a big day today full of some exciting surprises! We woke up in Sheridan and took a quick drive through the historic downtown area where there are some cute shops and restaurants (in original buildings from the 1910s and 1920s). There are also a bunch of sculptures downtown as part of a public art project they have going on:

After that, we headed out. Today was supposed to be about getting distance behind us and moving on to our next location, so we weren’t bothered by the fact that it was a bit cloudy and rainy, at least in the beginning of the day. Our route took us through the Big Horn Mountains!

This was a beautiful drive. Somewhere in the middle of it, we saw our first snow of the trip!

It was weird because it was quite warm in Sheridan this morning. It was just a light dusting in most places, but we did manage to engage in a mini–snowball fight. I’m hoping the snow doesn’t get much crazier than this, though, because we totally do not have appropriate outerwear. (Foreshadowing!)

We passed right by Shell Falls, but unfortunately they are doing construction there and we couldn’t actually walk along the path where you can see the falls well. Right after Shell Falls, we found ourselves in this crazy canyon area with really beautiful and unusual rock formations all around:

Right outside of the Big Horn Mountains, we saw this thing (which we later discovered is called Chimney Rock):

As we continued west, we also saw some wild horses (in a protected area):

Our next stop was the town of Cody, founded by Buffalo Bill. Cody boasts a h-u-u-u-g-e Buffalo Bill museum and cultural center, a charming downtown, etc., but we went for this:

Old Trail Town consists of a bunch of structures that had been in Wyoming and Montana ghost towns; they were moved to Cody and reassembled. It’s kind of like a cross between 1880 Town and an actual ghost town. It was pretty good!

Our route out of Cody sent us into more scenic routes and through the Shoshone National Forest.

Look at all those switchbacks. I can’t even tell you how totally over switchbacks we are right now. And eventually, we saw something I personally thought I would probably never see:

We decided just last night to come into this tiny corner of Montana so we could go into Yellowstone through the Northeast Entrance. So now we’re at a hostel-y feeling Super 8 in Cooke City, Mont. It’s very exciting! Oh, except for the fact that it was totally snowing when we arrived!! The snow began pretty much right after we crossed into Montana. It was kind of a sleety snow and very cold (remember our lack of appropriate outerwear). I scrapped my big plans to do laundry at the motel this evening in favor of a relaxing and very delicious dinner down the street at the Beartooth Cafe. Cooke City looks adorable in the dark, so I can’t wait to see it in the daylight tomorrow!

Our day began with a drive through the Spearfish Canyon Scenic Byway!

We stopped to see Bridal Veil Falls:

…and Roughlock Falls:

We also tried to take a road down near Rochford, S.D., because someone at the S.D. visitor’s center told us there were some ghost towns down there, but alas, she was wrong… or she’s just a liar. Either way, no ghost towns. But there was this:

We’ve seen a few signs warning of cow crossing but hadn’t actually experienced one yet, so that was pretty exciting.

After that, we said goodbye to our beloved Black Hills and moved into Wyoming!

Hit the play button below to enjoy some exciting Wyoming theme music!

Our first stop in Wyoming was Devils Tower!

I can totally see why the aliens decided to land here because it is amazing. (By the way, every time I try to sing the Close Encounters of the Third Kind alien message tune, it comes out as the NPR news jingle. Help!)

I don’t really know how to explain what is so compelling about Devils Tower, but fortunately, as with the Badlands, someone else has said it better:

“A dark mist lay over the Black Hills, and the land was like iron. At the top of the ridge I caught sign of Devils Tower upthrust against the gray sky as if in the birth of time the core of the earth had broken through its crust and the motion of the world was begun. There are things in nature that engender an awful quiet in the heart of man; Devils Tower is one of them.” — N. Scott Momaday

Devils Tower is sacred, spiritual place for the Native American tribes from this area, and (as you can imagine) there are many legends surrounding it in their culture. Many of these legends tend to involve the rock pushing itself up from the earth with a giant bear trying to claw its way to the top, leaving claw marks all around the Tower. Most of the American Indian names for the Tower involve bears in some way (Bear Tower, Bear Lodge, Bear’s Hat, Bear’s Tipi, Bear’s Home).

Also, visitors are permitted to climb the tower. Omg!

See them?!

That thing is over 1000 feet tall and it looks to me to be pretty much perpendicular to the ground. Yikes! We saw 5 or 6 climbers today, and we got pictures of them all. So if you were climbing Devils Tower today (Sunday, September 21, 2008) between around 4:30 and 6pm, get in touch with me so I can send you my photos of you. You look really hardcore (in a good way, of course).

We also saw a ton of wildlife today, especially deer:

I lost count of how many times we saw herds of deer and antelope (particularly our current favorite antelope variety, the pronghorn), chipmunks, rabbits, birds, etc. No snakes yet!

Leaving Devils Tower was so sad. I would say it’s my favorite thing we’ve done so far, but this is the kind of trip in which everything is so amazing and unique that I have a new favorite thing every day. Pauvre moi!

Montana is officially Big Sky Country, but Wyoming boasts a pretty awesome sky too:

We saw more stars tonight than either of us has ever seen in a single sky (probably put together). Nicely done, Wyoming.

Now we are settled in at the Super 8 in Sheridan, Wyo. I should also report that we’re both feeling much better. Brian still has a pretty bad cough, and we’re both going through our lotion-infused Kleenex pretty quickly, but all in all things are much improved on the health front. Hooray!

We joyously left the terrible Super 8 in Worthington (it puts the Super 8 brand to shame, seriously… never stay there, ever) this morning and soon we were in South Dakota!!!

On our way along I-90, we saw this:

Yep, it’s a giant cow head and also a giant flowerpot. Awesome! We wanted to take a closer look, but:

Alas, apparently this is some kind of awesome sculpture park, but we were thwarted by this sign. It was very sad, and I found the website so I know we missed some awesome stuff. Sad! But we had to persevere to our next destination:

The Corn Palace is a multi-purpose arena in Mitchell, S.D. The building features murals made out of corn. It’s quite a thing to behold. The murals on the outside are redone annually; they have a festival every year in August, and around that time, they start taking down the old murals and replacing them with new ones in the next year’s theme. A greeter at the palace explained to us that it’s tricky to get the corn just right — dried out just enough so it’s workable but not brittle.

The 2008 theme was Everyday Heroes (firefighters, police officers, etc.). 2009’s theme is, and I am totally not kidding, America’s Destinations!! The murals are going to feature the Corn Palace (natch), the Kennedy Space Center, the Statue of Liberty, the Space Needle in Seattle, Mt. Rushmore, a D.C. collage (holla!), the Crazy Horse memorial, the Hoover Dam, the St. Louis Gateway Arch, the Alamo, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Grand Canyon. How appropriate!!!

They’re in the middle of putting up the new murals right now, so we had some of 2008’s murals and some of 2009’s to see, as well as some partially completed murals. Here is the front of the palace as it is today:

Here’s the Corn Palace’s mural of itself (very meta, Corn Palace). You can see the actual corn cobs here:

And here I am in front of the partially finished D.C. mural. The Corn Palace is big!

That’s going to be Lincoln on the left. Awesome!

We kept heading west on I-90 and eventually reached Chamberlain. Lewis and Clark made a stop here, and Ambrose and Clark did, too. Check this out:

The east side (which is the near side in this photo) is like normal midwesterny-looking farmland with grass and trees and the like, then you cross the Missouri river and suddenly you’re in rocks and hills and crazy South Dakota landscape. Brian and I could not get over it. And things just got weirder from there.

We had been seeing signs for miles for “1880 Town” and we weren’t planning on stopping there (honestly, we thought it looked pretty trappy from the copious billboards), but when we got in the vicinity, we realized we needed to take a break for nature, so we stopped. We still weren’t planning on going in, especially since they were semi-closed when we arrived, but things took a turn and we ended up going there. And guess what? IT WAS AWESOME!

It’s a bunch of actual buildings from the Old West (that were moved to 1880 Town) including actual antique furnishings and relics. You can go in the buildings and sit on the furniture and everything. I totally felt like I was walking around a real Old West town. There is an amazingly restored saloon that is the highlight of the place:

It’s beautiful and you can buy South Dakota sarsaparilla and sit in there and pretend it’s 1880. They also have costume rental so you can dress up and go take your own photo anywhere in the town! Awesome. We didn’t do that, but if we had arrived earlier we totally would have. You can see Jim the bartender in the photo above. He and his wife Marcie are working in 1880 Town for the season and then continuing on their RV travels around the country. We talked to Marcie for a really long time about our various travels. Marcie and Jim are awesome!

By the way, 1880 Town also has an entire huge setup of props from Dances With Wolves, if you’re into that sort of thing.

After we left 1880 Town, it was starting to get kind of late, and by the way Brian was really not feeling all that great at this point, but we made kind of an interesting decision once it was clear we needed to drive all the way to Wall if we wanted to find a decent place to stay. You see, there’s a little road that takes you off 90 down through the Badlands and back up to 90 at Wall. So we went that route even though it was a bit out of the way.

I really don’t know how to describe what was going on in the Badlands and how utterly surreal and bizarre it was to drive through them in the dark, especially without having ever seen them in the day. In fact, I haven’t even seen very many pictures of the Badlands. Since Brian and I figured out where we wanted to go on this trip, we have avoided looking at photos of the places we want to go as much as possible so we don’t get too spoiled. The road through the Badlands was almost totally deserted, and there are no lights or anything obviously, so we just had the bright moon and starlight, and we were driving through this weird road into these VERY weird-looking rock things that we could barely see at first. I was totally freaked out, honestly. I mean, it was like we drove to another planet, except that we kept seeing deer. We saw like 10 or 12 deer in the Badlands tonight. We saw a bunch of rabbits, too. That was a crazy juxtaposition, like, I think of deer and rabbits as being something I would see in Maryland or Virginia, not on Mars.

Once we started getting to crazy-ish looking stuff, we pulled the car over and broke out the tripod. This was before our eyes fully adjusted to the light, and we didn’t even really know what we were looking at, so when the camera finished its 10-second exposure, we were shocked, delighted, and in awe to see this:

All these photos from tonight are lit entirely by moonlight; we didn’t alter them in any way (though you can see some red in some of these from Pearl’s brake lights)! The camera is able to see a LOT more than our eyes could. Look at that sky and those stars!

I was so scared that I literally ran back into the car right after we took that one. I don’t know what it is, but whatever these rocks or whatever are (we’ll find out when we go in the daytime and can talk to people at the visitor’s center) make me nervous. I guess it’s that they are so foreign and so imposing… and also the fact that the utter silence and stillness out there kind of made me feel like I wasn’t supposed to be there or something. It’s hard to articulate, but hopefully you can get the sense of what I mean. It’s overwhelmingly strange in the Badlands.

Whew! I can see why a friend of mine got goosebumps just mentioning the Badlands to me when she heard about my trip. Brian and I are planning on returning in the daylight tomorrow or the day after (depending on how he’s feeling), and I bet we’ll have a completely different experience. Crazy Badlands!

Tonight we’re at a Motel 6 in Wall, S.D. It’s a bit touch and go at the moment in terms of Brian’s health. We’re definitely planning on staying two nights here so he can chill out and try to recover. Besides going back to the Badlands, we also have to visit a particular drugstore here in town. After that, we have tons of things on our list for South Dakota, so everyone please cross your fingers for Brian and hopefully we can move on on Tuesday!

Today’s journey took us through some very pretty parts of Pennsylvania:

And Pennsylvania thanked us when we left:

Then we were in Ohio!

Like PA, Ohio boasts lots of pretty farmland:

But I think what I will remember the most about Ohio is seeing the service plazas off the Ohio Turnpike shaped like Ralph Wiggum’s head (Brian’s words):

Right? Incredible likeness:

The other thing I noticed in Ohio was that many farms had a private pond, often with a little dock and/or diving board. They were all pretty awesome, but they only seemed to come up when I put the camera down. Sorry!

We also drove near Toledo! This is the first city we’ve actually really been able to see well from the highway since we left Virginia:

Anyway, then we got to Michigan!

We made a quick stop in Ann Arbor so we could go to Zingerman’s:

For the uninitiated: Zingerman’s is kind of the Zabar’s of the midwest (sans housewares). It’s an awesome deli with a ton of local products, gourmet food, things made with care, etc. It’s also a really interesting company with (apparently) good core values. So I’m a big fan, and so is Brian (in fact, going there today was his idea). Hooray!

We did run into some rain tonight, plus we had a silly little detour due to… construction, I guess (it wasn’t clear), so we had to backtrack a bit. We’re staying at the Knights Inn in Saginaw, Michigan, which is about 3 hours from Traverse City (though the detour may be an issue). We got in quite a bit earlier than we did last night, so we’re hoping for an earlier start tomorrow…

As planned, we left directly from my class this afternoon (in Arlington, Virginia) so we could get a few hours of driving behind us. We’re heading towards our first destination of Traverse City, Michigan, recommended to us by the best dentist in DC the universe. Our journey today took us through a bit of Arlington, so we got to enjoy some DC-area sights, including the Pentagon!!

We took the GW Parkway to the beltway. I was really glad Garmin took us this way because something about the GW Parkway really feels very Virginia to me. I guess it’s all the trees.

We stopped at some scenic overlooks along the way.

When we were here I commented that before we come back, all these leaves will have turned for autumn! Crazy.

Then, Maryland!

Our journey took us up through Frederick, Maryland, where there is another scenic overlook that feels really Maryland-ish to me, or at least Western Maryland-ish:

We also came close to Brian’s hometown:

By the time we reached PA, it was dark.

We enjoyed an excellent stop in the unincorporated town of Breezewood, Pennsylvania:

Unfortunately, none of the photos we took really convey the intensity of Breezewood, but please trust me: it is very intense.

Now we’re in the Super 8 motel in Somerset, Pennsylvania, and it’s one of the nicest inexpensive just-off-the-highway motels I’ve ever seen (which is saying something). Bonus points for free wi-fi; well done, Super 8.

Tomorrow the plan is to get as close to Traverse City as we can. We really wanted to get some miles behind us these first couple of days, but I hope I can have some more interesting photos (beyond state signs) to share soon. We have some pretty exciting places on our list for Michigan. Woo hoo!