South Dakota

Jane Reporting for 23rd September

State Quarters
Starting with another state quarter, just to change things around a little:

State Quarter: Oregon

Today
Gary's instructions in the itinerary for today (23rd September) were to have a good book ready for the long, straight drive across South Dakota from Rapid City to Sioux Falls, all on the I-90.

We got away as planned at 8am and headed out on the road across the state, stopping at the famous 'Wall Drug' complex.  Starting out as a drug store that decided to offer free iced water it has grown into a rabbit warren of departments (almost shops in their own right) displays and attractions.  And it still offers free iced water and 5 cent coffee.

Socks at Wall Drug

There was a cafe, a donut shop (making them as we watched), an ice cream parlour as well as all the shopping areas.  You could buy postcards and stamps for them (which is not usually the case).  And hats:

Hats at Wall Drug

As well as the books in this photo of Gary's there was a huge selection of Laura Ingalls Wilder children's books (Little House on the Prairie, etc) and the biggest selection of woman pioneer books I have seen to date - and I do look into all the gift/book shops I can.

Books at Wall Drug

This is an awesome photo of Gary's as it was a 'drive by':

Dinosaur being walked beside the I-90

After crossing the Missouri River (now a very much bigger river than when we saw it in Great Falls) we stopped at a rest area and view point.  I trotted off down a path to take a photo back over the river only to discover this sign:

Not sandal country, then?

But I tiptoed along the very middle of the concrete path - jumping nearly as high as the cricket/grasshopper insects each time I disturbed them from sunning themselves on the warm concrete - and managed to get this photo which shows how wide the river has become:

Missouri River

For the most part the journey across South Dakota was through crop-land, though there were some stock areas.  It was pretty dry looking but there there was water there was a sudden bust of green.

South Dakota scenery

What Gary sees:

The I-90

My 'photo of the day':

More scenery with added silos

To the Readers

As we're terribly curious people, we'd appreciate it if those who are following our trip on the blog drop us a quick email  on thirzajane+blog@gmail.com :o)

Wyoming and Mt Rushmore

Jane Reporting for 22nd September

Off at o'dark o'clock this morning (22nd September) heading out at 7am as there was a long drive ahead of us (more correctly, ahead of Gary) as we drove from Riverton, Wyoming, to Rapid City, South Dakota.

O'dark o'clock ... nice photo but if felt much darker and earlier:

Setting out at 7am

I have a lot of photos taken through the front windscreen (I'm sitting in the back seat) which show the roads.  The photos often include bits of the dashboard, mirror, or GPS and I call them  'what Gary sees'.  Here's one of them:

Our road through the state

And some scenery along our drive:

Always interesting rocks along the way

Large vistas and awesome hills

Another face carved from the rock:

Partially completed Crazy Horse rock carving

And then to Mt Rushmore:

The presidents' faces at Mt Rushmore

Gary and Geoff, taking photos

Looking back down the memorial, Lyn, Geoff, and Gary

Onto something completely different, Lyn has started collecting the quarters (25 cent coins) which feature each state.  This one is Nevada and shows the date which the state became part of the United States:

State Quarters: Nevada

We Drive through Yellowstone National Park

Jane Reporting for 21st September

Another photo post until I can get back to it.  A 300+ mile day yesterday (21st September), including Yellowstone National Park, and a 360+ mile drive today (22nd September) with a 7am take off.  The hardest bit of this post will be choosing only a few photos to summarise a busy day.

Montana

Once we arrived in Yellowstone we were flat out taking photos. Smaller than New Zealand's lost Pink and White Terraces - and white - but the Mammoth Hot Springs terraces give the idea how lovely 'our' terraces must have looked.

Mammoth Hot Springs terraces

Lyn and Gary

Thanks to the FAQ about the bison in Yellowstone on the park website I  now know that "Yellowstone is the only place in the United States where bison have lived continuously since prehistoric times." which is pretty awesome.  In other areas where they have herds of bison they have had to be re-introduced.

Bison grazing alongside the road

At the Midway Geyser Basin:

My shadow in the stream, hands up taking photos

Hot water running into the stream

With such a big day of driving and sight-seeing timing was always going to be important when we arrived to visit the 'Old Faithful' geyser.  Yet another very useful FAQ tells me that the interval between eruptions is a range between 60 minutes and 110 minutes (1 hour 50), so we were lucky to only have to wait a half hour, during which we had lunch. :o)

Old Faithful Geyser

We did another couple of quick stops before leaving the park, one at Thumb Lake and the other at Lewis Falls.

Thumb Lake

Lewis Falls

I think I'll put the Grand Teton National Park and Wyoming in another entry.

A day in Vancouver

Don reporting

Packed up this morning and checked out of the hotel then took a taxi to the railway station. Checked in my cases for the train to Toronto this evening. Grabbed another taxi to Mcleod's second-hand book shop in up town Vancouver. Found one book a facsimile copy of Amundsen's book and having it post back to NZ. The books shop now has many more books than last time, piled on the floor, in places two columns deep and to height of the second or third bookshelves. A real second-hand bookshop, books every where, not many like this left these days.

From here I walked up town had a meal and headed to The Bay - The Hudson Bay Department Store, that is. I was not dressed for the hot humid weather and as all my summer clothes were in my checked bag I decided to buy some light clothes. This I did after eventually finding the men's department on the sixth floor. After parting with some money came out looking completely different and feeling considerably cooler.

Headed back to the railway station, a big stone building with a cool interior - what a nice place in this warm weather. The only problem is the one ATM machine doesn't like any of my cards.

Ok I am back writing - the money exchange office, here at station, has just opened and the nice man behind the thick glass window has just given me some money

While in town I saw some White and Blue Smart cars with the logo 'Car2go', I saw some being driven and a couple parked on the side of the road. The cars are electric and it seems that you have a one time joining fee of $35 and it cost 35 cents a minute or $13.99 per hour. There are about 300 and you can seem to grab them any where and leave them anywhere. Sound interesting if you wont to know more try Car2Go.

Well that's all for day.

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The train 'The Canadian'

Don reporting

At the station the train, ready for boarding, is split into two sections. When these are loaded the first section, with the front carriages, pulls out, a switch is thrown, and then the front sections reverses and couples up to the rear section. A slight bump and we are off.

Waiting to board we have the use of a small lounge and an outside seating area. The later, in full view of the train is what I made use of. The sun had gone down, the temperature had fallen and it was still twilight - very pleasant.

Sitting outside offered plenty of interest, seeing the bags and supplies loaded onto the train. Passing just where I was sitting had been fresh vegetables, boxes of food, a complete cart filled with bags of ice and to go with it bottles of wine and other interesting things. Looks like we won't go hungry or thirsty.

About 8 pm we boarded the train. I found my room and there was my bag waiting for me. A quick look around my room - the layout can be described from the following photo...

Here I am sitting on my seat taking the photo looking into a mirror. Immediately in front of me, out of sight at the bottom of the photo, is a toilet with a seat cover on top. When used as a foot stool my feet are about 6 inches from wall with the mirror on. Just visible to the left is a wash basin and a tap for drinking water. Behind me, reflected in the mirror is the fold down bed and high up very effective fan. Luckily I can sleep through without the need of the toilet, because when folded down the bed complete covers it. Just a few steps down the carriage is a shower complete with a changing room. Everything is quite compact but more that adequate for the four day journey.

Three coaches, towards the front is the first of two dinning cars while one car to the rear is a a lounge car with dome observation area.

Today we are travelling through the Rockies and while at lunch the train slowed so we could see the Pyramid Falls.



That's all for today. I hope to get of at Jasper to use the WiFi in the station to post this.

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Great Falls to Bozeman plus Lewis & Clark

Jane Reporting for 20th September

As today (20th September) had a relatively short drive of 185 miles we decided to look around some of the attractions in Great Falls.

We drove out to see Rainbow and Black Eagle Falls.  The falls themselves weren't hugely spectacular and, having seen other photos, that may have been an issue of water flow.  The river is the Missouri, the longest in the US and the 'great falls' are a series of five waterfalls which drop the river 187 feet.

Rainbow Falls and dam

Despite the water over the falls being a bit meagre, just being out in the countryside was amazing.  The weather was perfect and the sky incredibly blue and cloudless.

Looking downriver at Rainbow Falls

We heard a bird talking away in the grass and then he started singing.  When Gary started whistling back at him he relocated to a fence rail and I (naturally) stalked him for a photo or two (hundred).

The bird in the grass

Out of the many photos I took I liked the one on the right the best as the whole time I was taking photos of him he was grooming himself.

The bird on the fence

Next we visited the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail Interpretive Center which was very impressive.  I have a book at home about the Lewis and Clark explorations and was quite keen to visit the centre.  We all went to a short movie about the portage around the falls and I stayed on for a talk about the origins of the names of the Montana tribes.  Because the others had looked around the rest of the centre while I was in the talk, they then went off to see the Giant Springs nearby.

One of the displays - crossing the Rockies

All of the displays were interesting and covered not only the journeys of Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery but the peoples they met and the wildlife they saw.  This is how I discovered that my bird from Rainbow Falls is a meadowlark.

The two-story window overlooking the river

One of the best features of the center is the diorama of the expedition undertaking the portage around the falls which starts on a lower story and rises up to the lobby, all backed by huge windows which look out over the river.  That was certainly well worth the stop.

 
We had spent so much time at the centre we had lunch in Great Falls before heading out for Bozeman.  We only had a few stops along the way, and took a lot of drive-by photos of the Missouri River and the landscape as we travelled on.

Lyn and Gary at a photo stop

Missouri River

I am struggling a bit with the names for these flat-topped hills but found a blog post entitled 'The Difference Between a Butte, Mesa and Plateau' which is making me lean towards butte.  This, then, is one of those:

Butte?

And finally for this entry here's a vehicle we passed on the road.  Pretty impressive, whatever it is.  (There were two, the other was red.)

Interesting vehicle

From Canada to Montana

Jane Reporting for 19th September

Lots of straight driving yesterday (19th September) as we left Calgary and heading back into the US to drive through Montana to Great Falls.

We were apparently driving across from Vancouver under the rain cloud because suddenly all that is gone and we had a cool start to a lovely clear blue day with miles and miles of snow on the mountains behind us.  Poor Lyn spent most her time with her head swivelled like an owl to watch the snow-covered mountains recede.

Looking back as we leave Calgary

The funny thing about photos compared to what the eye (or brain) sees is that people seem to be able to mentally dismiss the foreground and see the mountains in the distance as much larger and more significant than they appear in the photo.  Many of our photos ended up as miles of paddocks and a thin strip that might have been snow-covered mountains but might have easily been clouds.  Unless we used the camera zoom, but that was asking a lot from the camera; zoomed, moving vehicle, taken through dirty glass.  Anyway, these are something like what we saw.

The mountain views as we drove south

We had one place to stop yesterday - another aviation museum.  This one was a small one when compared to the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum at McMinnville but it had a Lancaster bomber there that (with the addition of a blue hard hat) we were allowed to scramble about it.

Pilot Gary

The Bomber Command Museum of Canada at Nanton was certainly well worth the visit for that alone, but it also had second-hand aviation books for sale (proceeds to the museum) which we not only thought was a great idea, but we found a couple that just had to come along with us on our trip.

Lancaster

Recruiting posters

  
After driving the receptionist man mad with asking for different t-shirts in every conceivable size we eventually left him in peace and headed on towards the US border and our destination for the night.

As we drove along the long straight roads Gary became fascinated wit the snow-capped mountain ahead of us, insisting we check the map and tell him what it was.  There was absolutely nothing on our road atlas that t could be but that took some time and effort to establish.  There was a basic difference of opinion; huge and far away or small and much closer.

Gary was right with the latter option and the helper in the Travel Information and Interpretive Centre we stopped said that she wasn't sure but thought they were the Sweet Grass Hills.  They looked like mountains to me, but by the time we got nearer they did start looking like much lower, more rolling hills than I expected.  Odd though, that they appeared out of an otherwise flat plain like that.

Sweet Grass Hills

Also at the centre were some dinosaur exhibits including this chappie standing guard outside:

Dinosaurs roaming

And as you walked toward the front doors there were a number of quotes about travel set into the pavers.  Following one set along Lyn and I discovered we had moved from the philosophy of travel to the reality. It certainly got a laugh from us.

From philosophy to reality