Omaha - Mt. Rushmore - Yellowstone 4-7.juni 2007

Leaving Oklahoma we drove all day and landed in the evening in Omaha, Nebraska, at the house of Jessica's college friend Manny. He and his wife Lindsay moved to Omaha two years ago when Manny began dental school. We were fortunate to enjoy their hospitality for the night, their 3-year old son Gabriel who wanted to stay and play with us all day instead of going to school, and their Dachshund Jake who was very sweet but had a nervous bladder. They bought us pizza, gave us a comfortable bed to sleep in, and even packed us snacks and bottled water for the next day's drive!

Jessica hadn't seen Manny since their graduation from the University of Dallas in May 1999. 8 years is certainly better than never!!

Our warmest thanks to Manny and Lindsay for their hospitality in the face of hit-and-run friendship maintenance. We send our best wishes to Manny for his last two years of dental school, and to Manny and Lindsay for the approaching birth of their daughter! Now they know where to find us, and next time it's our turn to play host and repay them for their kindnesses :-)

From Omaha, we got an early start westover on highway I-80. No real point in leaving early because after Lincoln there's NOTHING to see anywhere. Anyway, after 5 hours of painfully boring interstate vistas of central Nebraska, we let our impulses reign and turned north at Ogalalla to drive north through the state instead of just crossing directly over it into Colorado. Our eyesight and hearts were immediately relieved as the landscape suddenly regained interesting-ness and traffic boiled down to a trickle.

We stopped for the quaintest of lunches at the Lake McXxxxxx recreation area. Stein Magne made grilled cheese sandwiches and Jessica took pictures of tiny dragonflies (?) with her new macro lens. Life was good.

An older couple paddled quietly past our picnic site in their kayak, and both of us really wished we could be doing the same. Oh well, no kayak in our car, so we finished lunch, packed up, and started to drive away. Coincidentally, said older couple were just pulling their kayak up onto land when we drove past, and Jessica couldn't resist sticking her head out the window to find out exactly how much fun we had missed out on. When suddenly the very kind woman, name of Pam, asked us if we would like to take the kayak for quick spin. Of course we would, we were on vacation! We clocked a short paddling trip, just long enough for a few paddle wars and heated discussing about unnecessary splashing and erratic steering (Jessica was captain, of course). But it was a lovely little detour, many thanks to Pam and her husband for their generosity!!

We kept driving north from there, where the landscape was gradually transformed into less rolling grassland and more high desert with rolling hills. We saw lots of cattle and horses (MAN did they have it good) and oceans of rolling grasslands.

We saw a few brown (?) eagles, a coyote, antelope, and other cool critters (Jessica's short-term memory is rather lacking in these post-dissertation defense days). Jessica also insisted that Stein Magne stop the car so that she could rescue a poor defenseless tortoise that had set out on the perilous journey across the two lane highway. Meddling with evolution??? - only time will tell...

The "towns" we passed through were of such a nature that one truly would miss them if one blinked. The idea was to take 63 North to 71, and then to take 63 again north to the I-90 intersection in South Dakota. Just south of Merriman, Nebraska, the skies turned an ominous array of greyscale colors and the weather looked rather foreboding, although the sunlight in the background made for some fantastic landscapes.

Once we hit Martin, SD, the rain started coming down in buckets, and continued to do so for the next several hours. Things seemed to be going well according to Jessica's plan to be in the Black Hills National Forest by about 8pm that evening, when we discovered that highway 63 North was closed due to muddy conditions. DOH! We ended up driving about a 3.5 hour detour east and north through the Indian Reservation (poverty poverty and extreme poverty). However the experience was not completely wasted as we saw for the first time in our lives cow ear tags (in assorted colors) for sale at the Mission gas station. Farming country, yep.
The sun was just going down as we drove on, and we managed to snap a pic, although the colors in the picture really don't do it justice.

By the time we got to I-90 it was almost dark, and we were both fairly fried as we had been driving since 7am. We continued the (very boring) interstate drive westward toward the Black Hills, where we intended to camp. I thought there was nothing in Western Nebraska, but W. NE doesn't hold a candle compared to the drive across I-90 in South Dakota. There's not even any bushes, no towns, no nothing. Makes you wonder how the settlers felt 200 years ago, facing all that nothingness.
We finally pulled into the National Forest around midnight and proceeded to try and magically locate a campsite in the pitch dark without a park map. After driving through the very creepy tourist "town" of Keystone, we winded up the roads past Mt. Rushmore (couldn't see a thing) and eventually found a campsite. There wasn't much discussion at that point since we were both exhausted and only interested in getting the tent set up and ourselves into our sleeping bags. Lights out.
The next day, as expected, we crawled out of our tent at around 9:30am and got to see the Black Hills national forest as it looks during the day, and it was truly lovely. Unfortunately, we had a schedule and couldn't linger. We drove out of the park towards Custer National Park and snapped a picture of Mt. Rushmore in the distance, as we didn't want to waste the money paying to actually drive into the monument area. Interestingly, the road was very windy and had the occasional one-lane tunnel carved through the rock. Every single tunnel we drove through had a bulls-eye view of Mt. Rushmore through the tunnel, just showing that the engineers who built those roads had an eye for marketing.

It was a very cool effect, and enabled people to get lots of glimpses of Rushmore before actually getting to the monument.
After piddling a bit in Rapid City buying food and whatnot, we hit the road westover around 3pm. That afternoon was by and far the windiest rest area lunch we've had. We drove through Sturgis, which is suprisingly small for a town that hosts bike week. But the prolific camping facilities in the surrounding areas probably help with that. We left the interstate at the town of Buffalo, which was pretty big and had some cool stuff. The drive westover from Buffalo was beautiful, with canyons and rivers and valleys and grasslands and desert - a truly dynamic landscape.

Our (read: Jessica's) goal was to read the Yellowstone by that evening, but once again time wasn't much on our side, so we camped at a KOA just outside of the town of Cody on the Eastern side of Yellowstone. After paying $32 for camping on the grass in a tent for 8 hours, we got back in the car and drove to Yellowstone. At that altitude (~10 000 ft.), it was rather cold, and rainy weather was hanging over the park when we arrived. They were repaving the road at the east entrance to the park, and were allowing traffic through in one direction at a time with a pilot car. Since we had 30 minutes to kill while we waited for our turn, we decided to utilize the time to make breakfast. So we busted out the Bisquick and made pancakes while we waited. The nice man in charge of queue on our side laughed heartily, and we got several requests (i.e. for bacon, eggs etc.) from the other amused park visitors that walked past. Only had time for one pancake before we had to drive, but at least no one can say that we wasted our time.
Jessica's brilliant idea was that we could do the super-accelerator tour of Yellowstone in 3 hours, after which we would be on the road to Central Oregon, where we in theory should have been later that afternoon. Jessica obviously didn't do her reading-up on Yellowstone, because if she had should would have realized that "quickie" tour of Yellowstone is physically, cosmically and spiritually impossible. We stopped at some hot springs, but unfortunately the rainy windy weather prevented us from taking any pictures other than with the macro lens. But with the cold and damp outside, it tempted tremendously to jump in the deliciously warm-looking hot springs!

Fortunately we resisted ;-) We saw bison, which are just as large and scary-looking as one might imagine. Fortunately they are most likey used to constant car traffic and tourists and had no problems standing perfectly still while someone in a car 3 ft. away happily snapped pictures. The Park Services still has to forcefully warn visitors not to approach the wildlife in the park. Apparently, several hundred visitors each year are gored by bison because they get too close, imagine that!

The forests on the eastern side of the park also looked like they had recently been hit hard by a pathogen of some sort, because most of the trees were dead. There were also some areas that had been hit by forest fires, but the Yellowstone newsletter we received at the entrance explained that the park deliberately chose not to deal with naturally-ignited forest fires (i.e. started by a lightning strike) unless people or property stood in danger. We also went to see  the Old Faithful geyser.

While waiting for the next "blow", we wandered around and took some more cool macro pictures. There's quite a few myths about Old Faithful, which the park newsletter carefully disqualified. For example, it's apparently believed by some folk that the Park Rangers can make Old Faithful blow by pushing a button. You cannot set your clock by it, and the height and duration of each "blow" varies dramatically. The blow we saw was a wimpy little thing, with just a few belches of hot water that rose a whopping 5-6 ft in the air. But there were TONS of tourists standing around waiting to see exactly that - there was actually an air of anticipation, and there were gasps when the geyer showed activity.

From there we drove out of the park, past some beautifully tempting fly fishing rivers and rivulets. Mental note: next visit to Yellowstone should be from the West entrance and remember to take fly fishing equipment!
Only after exiting the park did Jessica the Travel Planner look at a map to determine how many miles lay between them and their destination of La Pine, OR. Hmm, about 800. And it was 2pm and we were supposed to be in La Pine around dinner time. Not gonna happen! Jessica the Travel Planner offically fired herself as travel planner as her plans were producing only endless hours in the car, exhaustion, and certainly no relaxation.