Blogs from Montana, United States, North America - page 62

Well we're away! A spritely 3 am start and it's all good. Nothing forgotten yet.... we'll see. The lovely ( wll lovely for January Calgary ) weather has made the roads BEAUTIFUL! 110km/h safe and sound. And Bruce will stay nice and clean after his spruce up for the big trip. Feeling a little anxious now we are finally away. So many questions...Have we made all the necessary arrangements? Have we got enough money? Is Bruce ready? I guess only time will tell... Missing my old and new friends already. I guess this is a test run for the big goodbyes in May. So we've made it safe and sound to Rapid City. Passing through Montana. Wow talk about diverse! Snow capped mountains on the right and plains as far as the eye can see on ... read more

Many more nights in montana than we had expected. Facing challenges of filtration and finding oil. Roguer and Domingo made numerous attempts at different locations to resolve issues with he machinery and seek out oil. Long days with sometimes no resolution. We had difficulties with the lack of oil or ill quality of what we could find. After gathering minimal amounts of oil and filtering issues in the fridigity, it was slow moving from Billings, Bozeman and Butte. We decided to make a push for warmer temperatures with what oil we had and to briefly go back on to petro-diesel. Chantelle mentioned that we needed to find our flow and we should move on. Roguer said it would be easier to work on the filtrating system in the warmer temps. Not just for us but also ... read more

Yellowstone warranted a second day so we headed down to the park early. We first checked out the thermal springs, it smelt like Rotorua if you are a kiwi. The colours were impressive with an array of orange, pinks and greens. Its hard to see how trees can grow in these conditions. I got duped into believing the others had seen a frog in one of the hot springs. I'll get them back one day, maybe at their wedding. The buffalos are humongous and after talking to a guide we learnt that Bison and Buffalo are synonymous, I had thought they were two different types of animals. The natives hunted them into near extinction and infact did kill off one species which were 25% bigger. They must have weighed more than a tonne. Nic and Lisa ... read more

We were surprised to open the curtains in the morning and see thick snowfall which had obviously been happening for a while. The deers looked freezing as the snow coated their backs. I guess they are used to it. I don't think I could ever acclimiatise, I 'm a hot weather fanatic. Thankfully soon after setting off the snow eased off and eventually stopped. We got over-excited when we thought we saw a wolf, it turned out to be a huskey dog and had a collar. Oops. An hour or so drive saw us arrive at the US border. We parked up and entered the immigration office with our passports. We got given a few forms and were filling them out when Nic went to use the toilets. The power tripper behind the desk yelled at ... read more

Today was an ish day. I got to sleep in, which was great, and we had the hugenormous cinnamon roll for breakfast (at 11) after a rather disappointing email. Then we went and payed with the kis over lunch, which was a ton of fun. I was with a bunch of boys who were enjoying watching cars, looking for punch buggies, and beating ech other. I think they were cheating, though, because I never saw one, and they were hitting quite a bit ;) “Cousini” they’d say, for PT Cruisers and things. “Hummer!” Oh that was exciting. Really they were just going for anything remotely similar. Then I joined in… “one with 4 wheels! … a Fed-Ex truck! … blue one!” Then they had lots of fun having their picture taken and taking pics with my ... read more