A Long Drive

It turns out that this is a long way to drive, but also very beautiful for the most part. Also I discovered that I-94 is slightly confusing going north out of Chicago, and it might not be wise to be talking on the phone while you transverse it. But I guess seeing 1.5-2 hours more of the country on an already 33 hour drive is not too bad...besides, southern Wisconsin is amazing, I didn't know that cheese actually grew on trees! I don't have a whole lot to report about that drive, the landscape is hard to describe and all at once amazing and depressing. Here are a couple of points.

I found myself very disappointed that the Twin Cities in Minnesota are not in fact twins. As a child I always pictured them as standing just across a river from each other and having identical skylines. This is not so. They are close to 10 miles apart and look very different. I guess that I would have assumed this in my aged wisdom, but I still found it very disappointing. The first night I stayed just past Minneapolis. The second day I drove almost exactly 1000 miles to Butte, Montana. I like to pronounce this (Boot-TAY), in actuality I have no idea how it is truly pronounced. You drive through a mountain range and then come out the back side and look down across the valley and Butte. It was beautiful, just like all those scenes in movies where the characters park and look "down at the stars", unfortunately I was not driving a classic yellow Cadillac or making out with some hot actress. It looked like this:



The next day I drove through the rest of Montana. I was driving through the mountains when I noticed that what I thought to be fog actually smelled like everyone in the state was burning their leaves and a few of them were burning their saunas. I realized that there must be a very large forest fire close to were I was, it made me sad but smelled delicious so I drove with my windows down for a while.

Idaho sucks. The mountains are nice but I was sick of driving in mountains and the construction didn't help matters at all. One thing of note was a small town I stopped in to get gas, the perfect picture of a small mountain town that hasn't progressed past the 30's, I think they still have gun fights in the streets.

Eastern Washington is no treat either, the only cool things were the dust devils that I saw all over the place and the fields that looked like rivers when the wind blew. The worst part was when I got within 15 miles of my destination but had timed it so that it happened at 4:30 Seattle time. Thus, with my bladder about to rupture it took 2 hours to go the final 15 miles.

Two things I forgot to mention and don't feel like trying to fit them in above. The gas station I stopped at in Butte was connected to a casino and the store was a small cash register nestled in among a vast liquor store, seemed funny to me. The second thing is I saw buffalo. I was driving past a large canyon and where it met the road there was a small hill. On this hill and facing the road was a huge buffalo standing there very stoic as though he were the guard who protected the door to the canyon. I thought it had to be fake...it wasn't. The thrill of seeing buffalo was later ruined by seeing a whole herd fenced in and sitting down to tea.