Westward, Ho!

The last week’s been kind of surreal. I think the van lag has set in, and my mind hasn’t caught up.

If you’ve been keeping up with Life’s Lessons over the past week, then you’re likely aware of the goings-on, but I’ll give my own synopsis here.

On Monday (wow, it was still June then!) it rained. And it kept raining. And we kind of knew Weather Lad’s last baseball game wasn’t going to be played, but we stuck around anyway, in hopes that he’d be able to get one final game in. At 3 pm we received the call that Aubuchon Field was unplayable, and the game would be postponed. Bummed out by that, we put a move on and decided to blow town a day earlier than we’d expected.

It was in my plans to cross into New York by ferry from Burlington, VT, so after bidding our adieus to the Nolette clan, we struck forth on US 2. On our way out of town we went through Rumford just to get a look at the field. It was sodden, and obviously unplayable even if it hadn’t been STILL RAINING...

So it was on to dinner at Crabby Jack’s in Gorham, NH. Lots of tourists trying to stay dry. Not a good time to be camping, motorcycling, or through-hiking. There were a couple of bedraggled AT hikers who I would have gladly given a ride had the van not already been full.

The ride through the rest of NH and VT was beautiful; rain let up and the green New England valleys looked a little like Brigadoon through the mist. We saw a young bull moose shortly after crossing into Vermont, followed closely by a bald eagle. I wondered what seeing them along our trail meant.

After a little bit of being turned around in Colchester, VT, we found the Motel 6 and made small talk with some other people who were headed to Maine from California. I told them I hoped they were bringing the good weather with them. Turns out they weren’t.

We got up and headed to the ferry terminal in Burlington (by the way, a very cool small city. I think we need to go spend some time there) and got breakfast while waiting for the ferry. By about 10:45 we were on the western shore of Lake Champlain, New England at our backs, and all of New York ahead. I planned to travel through the Adirondacks because you only go around once. Now we’ve done it, and I don’t ever need to do it again.

Got lunch at a small place in Russia or Poland, then jumped on 90 somewhere near Utica and headed west. Not a complaint or peep from the kids. Roughly 45 hours later we were in Niagara, and stopped for a couple of hours at the falls. I’d heard the American side was nasty and ugly, and the cities of Niagara and Buffalo really are. But the state park at the falls is very nice, and I much preferred being there than on the casino-and-high-rise-hotel-ridden Canadian side. It was somewhat surprising to see the Canadians outdoing us in ostentation. We decided to push through the remaining section of New York and into Erie, PA, where I knew of a place we could get good dinner along with wireless from our trip last year. I Googled a Motel 6 in Willoughby, OH, and set the coordinates in the GPS. After dinner it was another couple of hours of driving into torrential downpours, followed by eerie clear, until we were finally in bed.

Wednesday, 7/1. The first day of July, a milestone I hate. The road on this day would take us through Cleveland, which, at least from I-90, doesn’t appear to be anywhere near the armpit that Buffalo does. Ohio is pretty flat. And so is Indiana. There are Amish people in both states, and we saw an Amish carriage on one of the frontage roads in Indiana, as we whizzed by at 70 mph. After a meal at a Perkins Restaurant (I don’t really recommend it) in Indiana, we soldiered on to Chicago. Another thing I don’t recommend is Chicago at rush hour. Getting through Chicago took us roughly the same time it took us from Utica to Niagara Falls.

North of Chicago, everything widened out, and we flew by an empty Chrysler plant at about 73 mph. Then we bulled on to Madison, WI, another state capital, where Rach’s mom and uncle both attended UW-Madison. The kids were so incredibly good that we succumbed and let them go for a swim while I scouted out meal options near the motel. Found a franchise joint called Noodles & Company. It was excellent, and I want franchise rights in Maine.

The Motel 6 in Madison, WI is dumpy. Nasty, if you really want to know. Don’t go.

Thursday, July 2nd. I-90 northwest of Madison is really flat. There was a hill, but they seem to have torn it down to make a rest stop. Farther north, there are waterslide parks at every exit, with no discernible population for them to serve. It is weird.

We were once again excited to enter a new state, Minnesota, until I-694 turned into a parking lot. It was not so much fun at that point, as everyone seemed to be headed north and west of the city for the holiday weekend. About two hours from the ND border I decided I needed coffee and Cheerchick needed a new book. I found a Caribou Coffee place while Rach and the kids hit the MallWart. Mission accomplished on all fronts. Fargo beckoned. (You betcha!)

As we rolled into Fargo, we saw a Mexican restaurant, Acapulco, next door. Just what the doctor ordered. The kids went for a dip in the pool while some idiotic waster showed off for his girlfriend by diving and flipping into the 6’ deep pool. I removed myself because I didn’t want to be a Good Samaritan when he broke his neck. Predictably he seemed to have survived because God protects fools and children.

A fine Mexican meal and 2 Pacificos later, I was ready for sleep and a the next day’s long march to Bozeman. No internet in Fargo, by the way, so I had to get the weather report from the Weather Channel. Sorry it’s still raining. Apparently there was state-of-emergency-level flooding in Erie the day after we left. Apologies to those good people, too. We seem to be bringing it with us wherever we go.
Did I say something about Wisconsin being flat? Eastern North Dakota is FLAT. Holy crap. When it floods there, narrow rivers spill over their banks for MILES. No bison, though, except at the bison museum, which disappointed me.

After about three hours on the road in ND, there appeared small buttes, which provided for some relief. Rach took over driving in Bismarck, home of the butte-ugliest (see what I did there?) state capital building in the union. This one appears to have been designed by a depressed Soviet-era architect, circa 1957.

Somewhere west of Bismarck, but before the state line, the time zone changed again, from Central to Mountain. (We entered Central time in Indiana). This made our arrival in Bozeman before dark a much more certain thing.

As the landscape in ND got more interesting, about 30 miles from the Montana state line, we entered Theodore Roosevelt National Park. All of a sudden we were in painted canyons, with wild horses roaming around! It was amazing, beautiful, spectacular, and I now feel as though I need to return to southwestern ND some day. I was hoping that wouldn’t happen.

About half an hour across the Montana border is a small town called Glendive. It is the home of Makoshika State Park. Starting tomorrow I will be there for six days for a class on dinosaur paleontology for my master’s program. We stopped there for lunch just because. Lunch was okay, but nothing to write home about. Across the road from the restaurant where we ate was another restaurant that also contained a hotel and a casino. But the building looked a lot like Coulthard’s Pools. So apparently they can squeeze a whole lot of gaming fun into a small space out here in Big Sky.

I got back into the driver’s seat in Glendive, since Rach doesn’t like the 75 mph speed limit out here.

Another 2.5 hours down the road we stopped at Pompey’s Pillar, where William Clark of Lewis & Clark fame climbed a 200 foot cliff to carve his name in the sandstone on his way home from the coast. I don’t normally condone graffiti, but this is fairly excusable. I’ll probably blog Lewis & Clark later on; I have a lot of thoughts on the subject, but now is not the time.

After Pompey’s Pillar, we heard thunder and jumped back in the car. Immediately we heard a National Weather Service severe weather warning for Billings, about 25 miles east of us. Not only were there damaging winds, hail, and cloud-to-ground lightning, but there had also been observed a funnel cloud touching down. This plains stuff is out of my comfort zone. After stopping for gas in a town that was the Montanan equivalent of Carthage--small population and one gas station that didn’t take credit cards--we saw a pickup truck with an anemometer and other meteorologic equipment stop at an intersection up the road from us. We decided to try to talk with the driver and assess the risk up ahead. But the truck sped off onto I-94, and we did the same, keeping it in sight. That was the only section of road where the speed limit was 75 and I actually sped, figuring the truck was probably trying to find out where the storm was likely to go, rather than going directly into its path. As we headed west, the storm appeared to move south. At times there were ugly comma-shaped clouds, but they broke off and nothing seemed to develop into funnels. We forged on, and as the Rockies came into sight, new energy overcame us. Or else it was the adrenaline rush of New Englanders faced with severe midwestern weather. Whatever.

A couple of times the weather over the Crazy Mountains--I kid you not--looked really nasty, and threatened torrential downpours. It never materialized, though, and after a false alarm of a dinner stop in Big Timber, we jumped back on 94 to finish the last hour to Bozeman.

Bozeman Pass is unreal. On the way up, we kept seeing areas to pull off and put on chains. And we kept ascending. Near the top of the pass is an historical marker for Bozeman Pass. Bozeman was a bit of a scoundrel, and not someone you should name your city after. Nonetheless, the valley below shone brightly, with huge mountains to our south veiled in ominous gray clouds. Our descent into Bozeman felt much like a final approach at Las Vegas: a few turbulent bumps, and really fast. At the first Bozeman exit, we hopped off and found ourselves on West Main St. And the first restaurant we came to was the Montana Ale Works. Think Sunday River Brew Pub in a hip college town. We’ll be going back...

Anyway, Beth and James live about 2.5 miles from there, through suburban neighborhoods. James’ directions were good, and we pulled in at about 8:30 to a power outage. The grass in their back yard was soft, though, and all I needed to be comfortable.

Yesterday, the 4th, can be summed up thusly: two sisters and their high school friend, all of their husbands, and their eight kids, aged 9 months to eleven years. 7 boys and one girl. But Cheerchick had a great time getting acquainted with her youngest cousin. The boys played lots of wiffleball, hooted, hollered, rode bikes and scooters to the Museum of the Rockies, had a full day of gazing at dinosaur bones, made “waterworks” (food coloring dumped into a garden hose and then discharged, giving about 1.2 seconds of colored water), had a cookout, and ended up at a huge fireworks show in the center of Bozeman at 10 pm because that’s when it is sufficiently dark to do fireworks out here.

It’s been a big week, and in about an hour and a half I go to have dinner with some of the people I’ll be living with for the next week: as I mentioned earlier, it’s Dino Camp this week. So I’ve driven 3/5 of the way across the country with my family to spend a week away from them. Seems odd. I’ll try to keep you updated, but have no way of knowing what the internet access will be.

Hope it dries up at home, while I’m in the desert trying to stay hydrated. The irony is not lost on me.