July 22, 2020

We are home!!  We drove from Minnesota, through Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana today. 

 So we did:

 Five National Parks:  Badlands, Yellowstone, Grand Tetons, Glacier and Teddy Roosevelt

Three National Monuments: Effigy Mounds, Devil's Tower and Mt. Rushmore

Two State Parks: Custer and Pikes Peak

Ten States:  Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, Wisconsin and Illionois

That's a funnel cake truck.  Rick and Riley wanted to stop it and steal the funnel cakes.

That, my friends, is a cheese castle...in Wisconsin.

That is $100 of cheese.  

Riley and I saw this at a gas station.  It's sausages mixed with cheese curds as a snack.  NO but thank you for asking.

Why, yes, we did run into someone we know from dance marathon while in another state.  And ladies and gentlemen, it was awkward.  And not just because of the masks.

That is a giant cheese curd from Wisconsin.

That's a brat.  Rick ate it but no one really liked it.

I had trouble remembering why I took this picture and it's because I needed to go on and put the tolls into the calculator.  THey've turned off the toll machines but you still have to pay the tolls.

All the cities we've been to and their temperatures.

Well, fun.  It rained in Indianapolis but not at our house.

We went out to the garden as soon as we got home.  That's some veggies.

July 21, 2020

Today was not a terrible drive to the Twin Cities in Minnesota.  Rick had his eye on a brewery that he wanted to check out.  We were thankful that they were VERY observant of social distancing.  We sat outside after verifying a temperature check (yes, I took a thermometer on vacation).  The food was weird, though.  That's often a complaint of mine when we go to breweries.  They try to be fancy.  We had a pretzel with beer mustard and pimento cheese (which none of us had ever tried) as well as a cute little key lime pie (which was good.  Turns out neither Rick nor Riley had ever had key lime pie but tried it today).  Riley and I tried a couple of fun flavored sodas and some much needed water while Rick had beer.

We ended up getting wings for dinner.  They were expensive and made my tummy hurt.  Those are their fries.  

This was the clean seal on the door of our hotel.  I liked that even if it was just the illusion of safety.

July 20, 2020

We are heading home and are currently in North Dakota.  When planning this trip, I added in Teddy Roosevelt National Park because it was on the way home and we needed something to get us out of the car.  North Dakota is a new state for Rick but Riley and I spent a day on a train going across the state back in the day.  The park was more sight-seeing (landscape) than historical.  It's in the badlands so it had a lot of that interesting geological setup.  We also got "attacked" by a herd of bison that decided to cross the road while we were driving.  They were all around us, snorting and snuffing.

This was ole Teddy's first house.

We made tacos in the hotel room.  I know you are jealous.

July 19, 2020

Today was a driving day.  We drove to Billings, Montana. The plan was to stay at an At Home hotel.  It was super nice.  Rick chose it because they have a full kitchen and he was ready to have a home cooked meal.  Riley asked us to make caprese chicken.  Turns out, the kitchen didn’t have a stove but you could borrow a mini stove and pan, so we did.  I could cook one piece of chicken at a time.  So that took awhile.  We also had vegetables...which we have all missed.  The shower was the best part of the hotel with the bed as a close second and the curtain which we were able to close to give Riley her own room.

The joke this trip is how often I have spilled drinks on myself.when we got in the car this morning, I told Rick that I had a 3 day streak of no spills.  However, while making lunches (we did 6 hours in the car without stopping), the mayonnaise got away from me.

I found a single pack Mac n cheese that was microwaveable.  It’s a Cracker Barrel havarti and Rick was excited to have his favorite kind of macaroni and cheese.

July 18, 2020

Glacier National Park is another park that we have been without Rick.  Several years ago, we took the Amtrack train to Seattle, stopping at Glacier on the way.  We stayed there for three nights then hopped back on the train.  We flew from Seattle to San Diego where we hung out with Rick and the clown band.  The last time we went, we stayed in East Glacier, although we did drive around the park to check out West Glacier.  We also attempted the drive to the sun.  We got pretty much to the top going East to West but my dad was pretty horrified by the drive so we went back down. 

Soooo...we found out earlier in the week that the Blackfeet Reservation had closed the area around them because of COVID which happened to encompass the East side of the park.  We also heard that the lines at the park were awful.  So we got to the park at 7 and pretty much went straight in.  Rick said he wanted to go to the Sun right away to prevent the horrible traffic backups.  I was very nervous as everytime we went up a mountain, he asked how it compared to the drive to the Sun.  I just remembered that it was awful because I really, really don't like mountain driving.  However, I also get used to it.

So, up we went from East to West and it was awful.  Gorgeous but awful.  The light was flickering manically through the windows and it is just so high and drop-offish.  We eventually got to the visitor center and I realized that we had been there before and that I had now completed the drive to the sun.  Rick wanted to keep going and from that point, it was easy going.  We got almost to the end and the park was closed so went back up and over.  We also stopped and did some hikes.