Welcome!!!!

Enjoy the pictures and short stories from our great Westward Ho vacation of 2008. Capturing the spirit and the vastness of the West is difficult to do in pictures, but I bet your appreciation for the beauty of it will grow as did ours. For future, more in-depth observations from our great trip visit me over at www.hoosierhappenings.blogspot.com

Sorry, you'll have to scroll to the bottom to begin your journey!

Day 12

Completely uneventful.........a long, long drive home with only one Starbucks stop. The kids were glad to be home and ran crazy through the house with their arms waving in the air.

Back to good 'ol river city.

Day 11

We briefly visited the small Lewis & Clark Expedition Interpretive Center along the great Missouri River where they have a keel boat suspended in mid-air. I took a couple pictures of the concrete ti pis South Dakota uses for their rest stops too before we hit THE CORN PALACE and did the brief tour.

From Mitchel, SD we headed north to DeSmet, SD of Little House on the Prairie, Laura Ingalls Wilder fame. There we toured the homestead which was a nice break-then on to Walnut Grove, Minnesota for a visit to the Ingalls homestead site along the Banks of Plum Creek. This little tour made my wife very happy. We ran into an enormous bank of giant windmills between SD and MN. Amazing. We spent the night in Mankato, MN and ate dinner in the hotel restaurant all by ourselves and celebrated by son's birthday.

Day 10

We left Custer, South Dakota and headed to Chamberlain, SD via the Badlands again. The route we took out of the Black Hills wound through three stone tunnels and past these enormous presidential heads....yes, that's Ronnie, JFK and GW-say dubb'ya. We spent a little time in the Badlands where I dangled my daughter over a cliff and then ate dinner at the famous tourist stop "Al's Oasis" in Chamberlain-evidently even Al has gone high-tech.

Day 9

We just hung out in the Black Hills between Bear Country (traffic nightmare), Reptile Gardens and Custer State Park. We opted out of doing the Flintstone Village at Custer because they wouldn't let us mini golf-we did however mini golf at another location and I beat my wife by one stroke. At Reptile Gardens we spent time in front of their 1939 World's Fair Funny Mirrors and I visited with an old friend-Methuselah-at 127 years old it doesn't appear my riding him when I was 8 did much damage-although they don't let the kiddos ride him anymore. He's been with the park since the 50's. The kids pretended to be prairie dogs too.

Custer State Park in South Dakota is great for seeing herds of bison, wild burros and antelope. We enjoyed a quiet supper at the Blue Bell Lodge and then fireworks over Custer from the hotel parking lot.

Day 8

Thermopolis, WY, acquiring its name from the hot spring around which the town built its resort reputation, has an unusual tourist attraction-the ti pi geyser. Evidently at the turn of the last century the townsfolk constructed a stone ti pi with a pipe to create a fountain at the top, diverted from a hot spring. Mineral deposits quickly grew on the ti pi and the picture above is what developed over a hundred years.

Only my fellow "300" enthusiasts will appreciate the connection between Thermopolis & the Battle of Thermopylae-hence the bicep pic. I appreciate my wife humoring me-we didn't stop at Sparta, WI, however, for the same shot.

On to the Black Hills and Custer, SD for fireworks over Mt. Rushmore. The drive across rural Wyoming and into South Dakota was enjoyable. We stopped at the Powder River Pass summit and took a brisk and windy hike to the top. At Rushmore we joined over 30,000 other people to watch the fireworks. It was a mad house and our view of the fireworks due to the crowd was less than spectacular (half of George's head only). Also less than spectacular was the 5+ mile round trip hike to our car from Rushmore due to traffic and parking. Daughter on shoulders up the mountain and carrying her down the mountain on the way back at midnight our time. Ugghh!

Day 7

Our last day in Yellowstone-heading out of the park. Donuts and coffee on the road again. We drove and drove with our only planned stops to be the Hayden Valley area, Mud Volcano and Yellowstone Lake-all on the east side of the park.

We saw a couple of gray wolves near Hayden Valley (can you guess what that wolf is doing?), along with several bison-some up close. The mud volcano was a lot of fun........ahh, the smell of sulphur, smells like Yellowstone! We also saw and heard the Dragon's Cauldron-which bellowed out steam and sounded like a loud guttural kind of gasp. That was cool! Then it was on to Yellowstone Lake for some rock collecting. We saw another grizzly on our way out of the park too.

We stopped in Cody on our way through for a quick lunch and cowboy hats. I had to take a picture in front of the Irma Hotel, which Buffalo Bill built for his daughter. Then it was on to Thermopolis, WY for our next stay and a visit to the Wyoming Dinosaur Center. Didn't look like much from the road, but was a great stop-other than the community seemed a little strange.

Day 6

We grabbed a quick breakfast (donuts on the road) and got into Yellowstone early to head toward the Grand Tetons. It paid off.....not 10 miles into the park we saw a bald eagle, not far from its nest. It was a long, uneventful drive to the Tetons, but we were in high hopes of seeing lots of moose. A short time into the Tetons we saw a grizzly near the road.......but we never saw a moose.

We spent a little time at Jenny Lake-which was packed as most places were over the holiday week. Then bought food for a picnic lunch at a secluded spot with a spectacular view of the mountains-I think I could spend all day in front of a view like that! We did some hiking, delaying our leave until after supper so that we might see moose in the early evening-no luck. Then, back in the car for a long drive back to West Yellowstone where we were delayed by construction but caught an awesome sunset over the mountains, and spent our last night at the Evergreen.