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Published: September 22nd 2007
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South Dakota Badlands
Especially beautiful in the early morning. 16 September: We crossed three states in two hours this morning, staying overnight near the eastern edge of Washington, and then traveling east today through Idaho into Montana. It helps that the panhandle of Idaho is very skinny. One interesting observation: I-90 in western Montana is a worse road than the Alaska Highway, with poor surfaces, bad bridges, and big cracks in the roadway where the highway is trying to fall down the mountain into the stream below. (This judgment is based on my primary road criterion: can I drink my coffee?) Montana is BIG, and we’ll spend most of two days driving through it. We had a nice surprise today: months ago in Haines AK, we met Bob and Paula Getz from Tullahoma. Their RV was parked across from ours, and we HAD to ask about their Arnold AFB sticker. Turns out we have mutual friends. He called today to propose a get-together in November and to his surprise we’re actually behind them heading back to Tennessee. We may see each other in South Dakota.
17 September: Montana and Wyoming are big and brown with a definite rough beauty. This is the part of the country that’s paper-bag-brown unless it’s
The old home
A LITTLE run down ... irrigated in those huge circles you see from the air. Unless you can catch the mountains in the right light, they are impossible to photograph them effectively. It’s hot during the day, but it was 38 degrees F when we came out of the camper this morning. We use the AC in the afternoon and the furnace the next morning. By the way, we’re staying in commercial campgrounds for the electricity and the internet, making appointments for things like repair of our Isuzu, whose transmission died three days before we left. (That was a bad day - one of our two credit cards was compromised and had to be canceled and replaced the same day.) We began to wonder if we were meant to stay in Tennessee. This afternoon, we had fun trying to locate a great restaurant we enjoyed 16 years ago on our way home from our first Idaho trip. It was outside Sheridan WY, and we saw a magnificent lightning storm on the way back to our hotel. We MAY get a storm tonight too - it’s starting to cloud up. (The restaurant is closed.)
18-19 September: We bought diesel today for $2.87, the cheapest we’ve seen since we left Anchorage a LONG time ago. This part of the US is all sand, sagebrush and LOTS of antelope. We’ve spent yesterday and today calling doctors and insurance companies to find out how much my broken wrist will really cost us. We have good primary and secondary insurance, but the billing and payment process is a continuing mystery. While we’ve been on the road, we’ve used a modern electronic mail delivery service to get bills and insurance correspondence. You give your doctors and insurance company the snail mail address and the company scans the envelopes, sending them to you as PDF email attachments. You tell them whether to open and scan the contents. If you’re interested in this idea, check www.earthclassmail.com. If you’re like us, your main challenge will be to get the minimum-wage employees of your doctors to understand that you want to change your mailing address. Cost is $100-200 per year, depending on how much mail you expect to receive. We gave this new address only to the doctors we knew of - who knows what’s waiting at home?
South Dakota has long, slow, rolling hills and the eastern part of the state has black soil and enormous hay fields. The high grass is turning rusty-color, with sorghum, corn, and wheat fields. It looks like a rumpled green bedcover. The badlands are strange and beautiful.
20 September: We drove through Minnesota and Wisconsin today. For those of you worrying about the quality of the roads in Canada and Alaska, we’ll say this: they’re MUCH better than I-90!!!! Minnesota is by far the worst - no wonder the bridge fell down in Minneapolis. We stopped in LaCrosse WI where I lived as a kid. It’s still a nice-looking city and I took pictures of our old neighborhood to send to my sister and brother. One family-famous place is the West Avenue-Main Street intersection (then and now four lanes and busy) where my sister and I, aged 4 and 5, decided to see what would happen if we lay down on our backs in the middle of the intersection. After our mother got a call from a neighbor, we learned the consequences …
21 September: We’re in Illinois on probably the last day of the trip - with luck. I hope to post this entry and our lessons learned write-up, and invite anyone with questions about our trip to send them via this blog. Our next adventure will be a backpack trip across southeast Asia and China next spring, but don’t expect a blog, due to the challenges of internet access from that part of the world. Thanks for following our trip with us.
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