American road-trip: part 2
Okay, let's continue from where we left off last night.
The two day drive to Theodore Roosevelt National Park was exhausting. We really should have planned three days for that. Two days of driving from morning til late at night are not something you want to do immediately before... some more driving. And it turns out that seeing a national park in the US involves a lot of driving. They’re just so damn big, and often there doesn’t seem t be a path to just walk from point A to point B. That or the things we wanted to see were too far apart.
It was already getting dark when we arrived at our campground the rain stopped for just long enough to let us set up our tent and have some dinner. Then it started pouring and I think it didn’t stop until early in the morning. The next day, though, the weather wasn’t bad.
From there we headed for Yellowstone. Everything was going great until, in some small town that looked like this
we took a wrong turn. Or so it seemed, at least. We found ourselves unexpectedly high up in the mountains. The GPS told us to keep going, and there wasn’t much of a way to turn around anyway, and, if we did, we’d probably end up running out of gas somewhere 1000 feet above the nearest gas station. So we kept going. The views were actually beautiful. I wish we’d stopped somewhere for ten minutes just to look at things.
But Dad was freaking out at this point, insisting that this can’t possibly be the road we should be on, but that we must keep going anyway. He told me to keep looking. He didn’t say for what. A sign, maybe? Then he was upset that I couldn’t find it. Whatever it was, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t there. He seemed to think that if we stop the car now, it will never be able move again. To be fair, it was getting late and we were high up on a mountain and low on gas. So arriving in the town at the entrance to the park was a huge relief. In the end, it turned out we’d never taken a wrong turn at all. Whoever programmed the GPS that day just hadn’t looked at the map and noticed how deep into the mountains that road would take us. But we only realized that later that evening. After one more adventure.
Bison. Lots of them. In the middle of the road. It was pretty cool, really, but it took us nearly two hours to get through the herd. And then there was the guy who stopped his car in the middle of the road to take pictures of some deer (And I couldn even get a good picture of them). By the time we made it to the campground, it was the middle of the night. The site was nice enough, though and for the next couple of days there was a lot to explore.
After a few days we left Yellowstone and met up with another friend, G. For about a week we travelled together.
The two day drive to Theodore Roosevelt National Park was exhausting. We really should have planned three days for that. Two days of driving from morning til late at night are not something you want to do immediately before... some more driving. And it turns out that seeing a national park in the US involves a lot of driving. They’re just so damn big, and often there doesn’t seem t be a path to just walk from point A to point B. That or the things we wanted to see were too far apart.
It was already getting dark when we arrived at our campground the rain stopped for just long enough to let us set up our tent and have some dinner. Then it started pouring and I think it didn’t stop until early in the morning. The next day, though, the weather wasn’t bad.
From there we headed for Yellowstone. Everything was going great until, in some small town that looked like this
we took a wrong turn. Or so it seemed, at least. We found ourselves unexpectedly high up in the mountains. The GPS told us to keep going, and there wasn’t much of a way to turn around anyway, and, if we did, we’d probably end up running out of gas somewhere 1000 feet above the nearest gas station. So we kept going. The views were actually beautiful. I wish we’d stopped somewhere for ten minutes just to look at things.
But Dad was freaking out at this point, insisting that this can’t possibly be the road we should be on, but that we must keep going anyway. He told me to keep looking. He didn’t say for what. A sign, maybe? Then he was upset that I couldn’t find it. Whatever it was, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t there. He seemed to think that if we stop the car now, it will never be able move again. To be fair, it was getting late and we were high up on a mountain and low on gas. So arriving in the town at the entrance to the park was a huge relief. In the end, it turned out we’d never taken a wrong turn at all. Whoever programmed the GPS that day just hadn’t looked at the map and noticed how deep into the mountains that road would take us. But we only realized that later that evening. After one more adventure.
Bison. Lots of them. In the middle of the road. It was pretty cool, really, but it took us nearly two hours to get through the herd. And then there was the guy who stopped his car in the middle of the road to take pictures of some deer (And I couldn even get a good picture of them). By the time we made it to the campground, it was the middle of the night. The site was nice enough, though and for the next couple of days there was a lot to explore.
After a few days we left Yellowstone and met up with another friend, G. For about a week we travelled together.