Sunday afternoon John Douglas, Amy, new friend Erin, and myself traveled out to Anacortes to see about a possible job opportunity. I wasn't too keen on the job, but Desolation Point was amazing. Observe:


This photo is hilarious. I'm not sure exactly what is going on, but I have a feeling we were looking for good spots for napping. Which we did.

Afterwards, Amy summoned the Norse gods of the sea on the edge of this cliff.

day four

Oh, the glory of the God-Mountains!!!!! We left Montana and drove into Idaho only to see the wonder and the power that is the GOD-MOUNTAINS!

After we passed through Idaho, we entered into Western Washington, which is an arid grassland. This continued through most of the state until, BAM!, MORE GOD MOUNTAINS! There is no way to describe the magnitude of these mountains. It's insane. So I won't talk I'll just illustrate.

Now, keep in mind, at this point we are less than two hours away from downtown Seattle. Shortly thereafter, we entered the city, which has its own forms of godlike magnificence.

day three

In the morning we awoke to the glory that was Badlands National Park. The temperature was perfect, probably about 70 with cool breezes, and the soft grassy patches made perfect for camping. We saw bunnies, mountain sheep (which look more like deer), and many many many cute little prairie dogs. There are foxes, ferrets, and buffalo, too. But we didn't see any of them.
This was our camp site. I had already taken down my tent (which is totally awesome, I just got it right before the Gorge trip, and hence very proud of its bran-new-ness.)



The thing that I really loved about the Badlands was that it looked exactly like the Painted Desert, which I visited last summer, but it has these cute little tufts of grass on top of the buttes. Observe the benefits for meditation:

After we left the Badlands we drove on to our next destination, Butte, Montana. We were all set to camp in Butte, making sure that we wouldn't have another repeat of Monday night. But, as our luck and ill-planing would have it, this is what greeted us as we drove in to town:

In case you are confused by this picture, that's about 2 inches of snow on the ground. Butte was conveniently located at the very foot of a giant god-mountain. We got to the KOA, and after a little bit of consideration, checked into Eddy's Motel. In the comfort of our motel bed with cable television (oh, luxuries) we watched South Park until we fell asleep.

day two

The next day we knew that we deserved a break and were looking forward to arriving in South Dakota, the land of tourist traps! Our first stop was some place that claimed to have a cowboy town, live buffalo herds, and animatronic western scenes. It ended up having everything but the live buffalo, but plenty of amazing buffalo pelts. Then we started to see billboards for the Corn Palace.

The Corn Palace is located in the town of Mitchell, South Dakota (which actually is a really cool place, and it even has a little cafe called Mustards Last Stand, ha!). It is surrounded by 80 gift-shops, but once you penetrate through, you come across a Russian style palace covered in corn murals.

As you can see, the murals are made completely out of corn husks. Upon entering we found the work of a local Souix artist Oscar Howe, who was the Corn Palace artist in residence during the 1960's and 70's. His illustration style was so amazing, that we knew we had to find out more about him. Lucky for us there was the Dakota Discovery Museum and Howe Gallery. So we went there next.



The Dakota Discovery Museum was pretty cool and the gallery was amazing. They had not only the work of Oscar Howe, but of Edward Sheriff Curtis and Charles Hargens ,too (whose entire studio was recreated within the gallery). And the best part was the women who ran it was totally awesome. She even gave me a little book of her fiction writing. So we hit the road because Wall Drug was only a couple hundred miles away.



Wall Drug has to be the most amazingly ridiculous place ever to exist in the great 50 states. The story goes that Wall Drug got its fame by offering free ice water to weary travelers. It is located in Wall, South Dakota directly above Badlands National Park. There is really no way to describe this place. And if you haven't "dug it", then I guess there really is no way for you to know. Imagine hundreds of miles of open highway, cattle ranches on either side, adorned with hand painted signs advertising everything from a t-rex, to a travelers chapel, t-shirts, free water, 5cent coffee, useless things, etc. And when you finally come to your destination, being Wall Drug, it is a maze of gift shops, kitch museum-esque displays, old west themed everything, and, you guessed it, animatronic western displays.

It's easy to see how you could get lost in the wonderment of Wall Drug. And that we did. Being one who has a weakness for postcards, I was going crazy! So many hilariously mundane postcards of puppy dogs talking to frogs about their location, buffalo herds, airbrushed wolves, Native American exploitation, galore. And lastly, there were the displays of taxidermed animals dressed in western gear.


Day two turned out to be an Americana overload, and we were happy to finally put it to rest in the serene comforts of the Badlands National Park.

day one

John Douglas and I left on Monday June 2nd for the mighty west. We follow the northern route, stopping in Peoria to visit my grandparents. We had lunch and talked about ways in which my grandma could take her beach chairs with her on a plane without having to pay a $50 fee. We got back on the road and drove late into the night.

By the time we got to northern Iowa, we were exhausted. Being that it was very late, we decided that we needed to find a campground and get some sleep. Every exit ramp in Iowa looks exactly the same! Each directing traffic in the exact same manner and each advertising camp sites which do not exist! We tried exit after exit, until finally we had had enough of Iowa and it's grotesque roadkill smeared highways. We were on into the loving arms of Minnesota. But this was not the case. Minnesota instead greeted us with torrential rains (i.e. there had to be a tornado hiding in the darkness somewhere over the horizon). We had no idea where we were going to sleep or even how we were going to get there. We get off at an exit to follow yet another mysterious "camping" sign, but are instead pulled over by fake cops. (I will leave this section out because it might be embarrassing for John Douglas, since everyone knows you never pull over for people who are not the police.)

At this point it is now raining too hard for us to see the road. We just want to make it to Jackson so we can get a hotel room. Finally, at 4:30am Minnesota time, we get to the Motel 8. THANK GOD FOR MOTEL 8! It was run by Indian Buddhists who gave us a mini Black & Green dark chocolate bar in the morning at check out. I ate it for breakfast and in-turn got a tummy ache.

pictures of the gorge.