On the Road Again

Time for a quick blog update while on the road to Kentucky!

We started this leg of my summer journey on Friday bright and early (for me) at 7am and literally spent the day driving through three different states (to be fair, we were only in Washington for about 20 minutes until we crossed into Oregon). We covered about 700 miles in a 14ish hour drive and passed out in Idaho Falls.

Yesterday, we explored Yellowstone and it was AWESOME! It took a ton of time and set us back about half a day or so on the traveling but it was well worth it. We got to see multiple animals on the road and got to see two different types of geysers go off (including Old Faithful, below). Trying to put that visit into words would take way too many pages on this blog.

However, we got set back even farther with an ummm.... interesting side trip that our gps decided to take us on. It took us on an alternate highway that is closed during the winter. Usually that's not too bad, except for the fact that it was straight up the side of a mountain at a 10% grade. I already don't like heights so going up the side of the mountain from about 4,000 feet to 9,000 feet was not a good experience for me (or my car as we were putting up the mountain at about 19 mph). We did get to see some cool things when we hit the top of the road but it is not something I would like to experience again.

That white area is part of the road we went up.

Today, we visited three landmarks in the Wyoming/South Dakota area. Our first two jaunts were to Devil's Tower (which has a really cool legend attached to it) and the famous Sturgis (a must for my biker stepdad). We had an awesome lunch at Sturgis' Knuckle Saloon, I highly recommend it if you are in the area. 

However, the best part of the day was going to Mount Rushmore. I'm a very patriotic person and going to a memorial that honors four presidents was awesome. It reminded me of why I'm moving to Kentucky for my internship and made me even more excited to get there. Like Yellowstone, I can't put my Mt. Rushmore thoughts into just one blog so I'll leave it with a picture.

We have a few more days of traveling before we roll into Lexington sometime next week. If anything else exciting happens, you can bet that I'll try and include it in my next blog.

Until next time,

Mel