We have been in Washington for a little over three months now and I have finally, finally, FINALLY finished sorting through and editing some of my favorite photos of the trip out here.
We made the trek out from Connecticut in late June with two cats, one dog, and a one year old in a Subaru Outback. Not an experience for the faint of heart, but you do what you have to do. And truth be told, Nick and I kind of love this type of challenge.
The first portion of the trip was pretty uneventful. We have spent a fair amount of time over the years driving around various points on the eastern half of the country and we were trying to make good time to visit with both our families in the Midwest. So for us, the adventure really began with Kansas City onward.
The last time my husband and I had traveled through this part of the country it was in late November of 2006. Since then we really haven’t done a whole ton of traveling in the Western part of the country, and that’s a big chunk of country. So being as the weather was nice and we now had a toddler in tow, we figured we would stop and do some sightseeing, albeit limited, along the way. I am so glad we did.
First, we stopped for a few minutes at Wall Drug. I have a completely bizarre and unnatural love for roadside attractions like this. My husband hates them. A lot. So this took quite a bit cajoling, but we did stop and take it in. We got some free ice water and Gus got to run around a little. There was something so chintzy and fun about the whole experience that made me want to capture it in the classic way of families taking a road trip. Terrible exposure, blown highlights, missed focus the whole kit and caboodle of classic family snapshots. So it was JPEG and our little Canon point & shoot for me.
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Then back in the car for about an hour and a half. Our next stop was Mt. Rushmore, something neither Nick or I had ever seen. The monument is truly more impressive in reality than any of the gazillion images I have seen of it. The weather was perfectly overcast and it was a wonderful break to be out walking around in cool weather.
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And sometimes you just need to have the flexibility in your travel schedule to pull the car over and soak in views like this. Every twist in the road past Mt. Rushmore resulted in just gorgeous vistas.
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The most amazing part about driving through South Dakota, Wyoming and Montana is that you always seems to be driving through some sort of national forrest or national park. Now you could avoid this to a degree by staying on I-90 which makes you veer north out of Wyoming and into Montana through Billings and Bozeman, but we opted to take Hwy 14 then 20 through Bighorn National Forest, Buffalo Bill State park and then finally into Yellowstone, down to Grand Teton and Jackson Lake, which is where we stopped for a night. Now at some point during all this gorgeous, winding road nonsense our poor dog because car sick, which added a whole new degree of fun to the trip. (We still aren’t quite sure what set him off, could have been motion, could have been the occasional screaming from our kiddo, could have been the heat of the sun baking the trunk despite our best efforts to circulate the AC, could have been anything.) But getting to stay at Jackson Lake Lodge was totally worth all the random stops to clean up dog vomit. Jackson Lake Lodge has been around since the mid 1950s had has been wonderfully maintained. It was so easy to imagine throngs of families in the 60’s and 70’s migrating to this place in wood paneled station wagons and standing in the same lobby being stunned by this view.
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The following morning we made a little time to veer back north through Yellowstone and take a peek at Old Faithful before hitting the road in earnest again. Naturally, we missed an eruption by a matter of minutes, but we did get to see this random solo buffalo who had, according to a ranger, apparently taken it upon himself to hang out by the geyser everyday for the past couple weeks.
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From here we buckled down, made a one night stop in Missoula, MT (which I am truly sad we didn’t get to explore beyond our hotel) and were in our new home the following day.
