Third Stop-Billings, MT

Cloud, aka McLovin'

The next day we started off hours later than we intended. This has been a pattern for us. Ah, well. It is vacation after all.

As I mentioned South Dakota's landscape was becoming more dramatic the further west we drove.  Northern Wyoming had lots of wide open spaces for horses and cows.  The movie, "City Slickers" came to mind.  I wonder if in real life the ranchers hire city people to come out for a "vacation" to take their cattle from one area to another.

On this day, the driving became rather, for lack of a better word, long. I don't know if the wide open spaces were getting to me, but my butt was having a hard time enduring the drive.  Doggies were fine and Staff was a trooper, too. So I started to play highway games, something we did as kids to pass the time on long road trips. Usually it was the alphabet game, or giving the "honk your horn" signal to truckers, then laughing with delight when they actually honked it. The game I invented for my husband and me was "What mix tape would you make for me, if you were to make a mix tape?"  The rule was that you could only choose 20 songs. He refused to indulge me.

Because our cell phones were not working, radio stations were out of range, and we had listened to all the music and speaker tapes at our disposal, there wasn't much to do except watch the scenery. From time to time Staff could be heard muttering about our poor gas mileage and his concerns about all the up hill driving we were bound to encounter when we reached the Continental Divide. A long day indeed.

Staff's opinion of our gas mileage

Another highway game-"What on earth is that?"

We arrived in Montana later that afternoon, where the landscape was again spectacular. It almost makes you want to break into "America the Beautiful."  Dare I say that much of this beauty would have been lost on me, as I was really reaching my limit of long road tripping.  However, Staff suggested I start taking photos of the gorgeous scenes outside.  I had forgotten about the new camera he bought for us the day before the trip.  It was very fancy, we beyond my level of expertise.  But it kept me occupied, and then I became obsessed.  I think I took 300 photos of Montana from the highway.

Just an ordinary scene along I-90 in Montana.

Later that night we arrived in Billings, MT, again staying at the KOA.  Just another day or so to Hood River, OR.  It couldn't come soon enough.