Road Trip - Part 2

On the second day we headed out for Yellowstone. The goal was to get through to the west gate by the end of the day. It's a full day's drive to Yellowstone, plus another 1-2 hours to get to the far side, depending on how often you stopped.

The scenery out of Mt. Rushmore was amazing. I was driving so we don't have any scenic pictures. There aren't a lot of places to pull over and stop and by the time I realized a spot was coming up it was too late. Womp. Womp.

Maddie had been looking forward to driving in Wyoming and Montana because we had heard there were possibly no speed limits or that they were very high.

Well, there are speed limits but in this stretch of Wyoming it was 80mph. She thought that was kind of fun. Actually, we all enjoyed it. But driving 65 afterward was like crawling.

We went through a couple national forests along this route. The scenery was something we definitely aren't used to in Minnesota!

Maddie and Jake were our panoramic shot experts throughout this trip. They each got some interesting shots. So - though the pictures say I took these - I didn't. I was just too lazy to make a new digital stamp.

We did pull over to stop on the drive through the Black Hill National Forest. I saw and heard a river or stream down the hill and we decided to check it out. It was a bit of a climb down but as the rest of the trip proved, we were all more than ready to climb around and investigate!

It was quite a creek bed with tons of rocks to climb over and jump on!

We headed back up and continued our drive through to Yellowstone. It wasn't the sunniest of days and had been getting chilly when we would stop for sightseeing. This was our entrance to Yellowstone - accompanied by small hail:

We were greeted right away by the welcome committee:

We took some time driving through to the West Gate and did stop to pull over a few times. The scenery was really pretty - even on the dismal weather day this one had turned out to be.

Let me tell you - the west side of Yellowstone doesn't consist of much - and it doesn't stay open late. By the time we got to our hotel (in the furthest part of the town that didn't boast a ton of confidence) it was late and we barely found a place to eat. But we went to bed early because the next day was going to be all sight-seeing.