Well it seems that almost 4 weeks have passed since I last uploaded a blog! We had such an amazing time travelling around in the RV and the days were so busy that sitting down and writing was the last thing on our minds! We still can’t believe we are home and looking back at the photo’s quite how much we packed into 36 days (38 if we were being pedantic and counted the 36 hours we were delayed getting home – thanks BA)
In our last Blog we had just left Yellowstone National Park and were headed into mum’s 42nd state, Montana. Having watched some of the Yellowstone TV series, we were aware that the next part of our journey was through Paradise Valley where it is supposed to be set and we were excited to have a couple of nights stay in Bozeman. Being back in a 'big town' after a week in the national parks we enjoyed a meal out to try the Montana delicacy of a Bison Burger and we may have partaken in sampling a few beer flights.
Mum had booked into a hotel for a little bit of comfort for 2 nights, she was not so happy with the ‘seasonal bugs’ she shared her room with. Bozeman is one of the major cities in Montana and we arrived through what I was hoping was the back streets to get across town to our campground. What we had not anticipated and google maps seemed unaware of was that it was ‘Homecoming Weekend’ at Montana State University and the route we were on ground to a standstill and we were turned around as we were trying to go past the football ground at the Uni at kick off time. Not a good idea, I likened it to driving past Man City’s ground on game day.
To our amusement, this was not the only time we came across the home coming crowd. Our campsite was on the same site as the Bozeman Hotsprings that open at sunset and was seemingly the meeting point for hundreds of students before they partied the night away elsewhere. Before we knew it, we ended up in the hotsprings with hundreds of college students. I am not sure they knew what to make of Richards ‘Budgie Smugglers’!
We love the friendliness of the RV communities on the campgrounds and got speaking to a couple who insisted that we should definitely visit their hometown if we were travelling through Montana and what a great tip off that was. We spent a lovely afternoon exploring the historic Virginia City, a town whose high street has been preserved with many exhibit shopfronts from the days of the gold rush. We also spent a couple of hours in the saloon which had the greatest selection of local autumn craft beers that they had bought in for a beer festival the following weeknd.
The rest of our travels across Montana were quite uneventful apart from a stop off for lunch in Big Timber which had a petrol station, general store and huge gun shop all in the same building! The scenery was a little monotonous as we travelled across the high prairies towards our next destination which was actually back into Wyoming.
Devils Tower was on mums bucket list as it is the iconic mountain in the 70’s cult movie ‘Close encounters of a 3rd kind’ Mum even managed to pick up enough signal to watch the movie that night! It is quite an awesome place and there is an easy circular walk around the base. The scenery was made even more stunning as the trees were taking on their fall colours. This was also our first encounter of a ‘prairie dog’ town and we spent at least an hour with the camera filming and watching the really cute little critters bob up and down into their burrows, squealing warnings to each other whenever a car drove past.
After a stop off at the site of ‘the battle of the Little Bighorn’ and a night at a great campground in Buffalo, we headed into South Dakota, the state that surprised us the most in both its history and beauty.
The two main stop offs we had earmarked in the state were the equally as impressive Mount Rushmore and the Crazy Horse Monument. It was quite surreal stood in front of the four presidents carved into the mountainside as it is a scene I have seen in so many films and photo’s and you need to be there in person to appreciate the sheer scale of the monuments.
Crazy horse was an unexpected delight! The carving was started in the 1940’s and at present there is only the face completed and they are working on his arm and hand. At present there is no anticipated completion date – I have included a photo of a model they are working towards.
A recommendation from many people on our travels was that we must drive through the Custer State Park, renowned for its wild life in particular the size of its Bison herd. It wasn’t hard to find them as they were still close to the ranch after their yearly round up to check on the herd and tag the calves, which happened just a couple of days before we got there. The Park was stunning and the prairie dogs prolific, we must have seen thousands of them.
Our only actual accommodation booking we had made before setting of on our RV travels in The USA was in a town called Medora in North Dakota, a five hour drive north. We set off through a scenic driveway called Spearfish Canyon, a stunning drive in which we encountered a small herd of mountain goats. I have never seen creatures quite like them and they are more like baby polar bears with horns than goats. We had to laugh when they decided to take a little nap literally in the middle of the highway causing quite a roadblock!
We broke the trip up through North Dakota with a stopover in a small town called Bowman which was probably one of our favourite places we stayed for a variety of reasons. Firstly we had the quirky campground to ourselves as we were now truly out of season. We treated ourselves to a fab meal in the local saloon – the whole bar genuinely stopped and stared as we walked in! Luckily we were soon forgotten when the local high school rodeo teams turned up in full Cowboy hat and boot attire, apparently it was Rodeo weekend in town and it was a real glimpse into a very different way of life. The next morning, we had breakfast in the local fire station with the whole town, a local regular fundraiser that certainly showed the community spirit needed to live somewhere literally in the middle of nowhere, hours away from the next towns. We thought we lived in a remote place in the Dales, but this was something else!
Medora is a true tourist destination in North Dakota and the place where Teddy Roosevelt set up his home. It is also where he set up one of the first national parks which was well worth the 3 hour drive through for both the geological rock formations and the wildlife. The town is staged as a very quaint cowboy town and we were disappointed that many of the attractions were shut for the season, such as the ‘Pitch fork fondue’. Mum treated us all to night at the ‘Rough Riders’ hotel which was again a nod to the history of Teddy Roosevelt being one of the first US voluntary cavaliers nick named the Rough Riders.
Mum’s last stop on the trip with us was back in South Dakota. We drove down through a town called Sturgis famous for its annual Harley Davidson festival held at the Full Throttle Saloon. The metal sculptures as we drove past were so impressive that we had to turn around and take some photo's. The saloon itself was incredible with several bars and crammed full of memorabilia.
Our last day with mum was spent visiting the famous Wall Drug store and a drive around the impressive and outstanding Badlands National Park. The rock formations and scenery in this park are like nothing I have ever seen before and every corner we turned on the 30 mile drive gave a new vista. The colours changed from marbled and streaked tones of grey, to yellows and purple and ending with driving through a stunning red rock canyon. I likened aspects of it to the Grand Canyon, as the vast canyons are carved into the ground rather than the mountainous formations that we had seen elsewhere. We were much less impressed with the rattlesnake that was blocking our path back to the RV!
It felt strange to drop off one of our travel companions in Rapid city, but mum had 2 more States that she wanted to visit (Wisconsin and Michigan) before a much needed couple of weeks rest in Florida with my sister. The van certainly felt empty and huge for just the 2 of us over the next few days.
In next weeks blog we travel back into Wyoming again and spend 2 weeks exploring the wonderful State of Colorado.
We have created a mini series of our travels on YouTube which can be found in the links below if you would like to find out more about our travels and see more of the incredible scenery we have explored.
Montana and devils tower: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hopsA_mprfE
The Dakota's: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlMUrDIhw9s
Jackie and Richard