Wyoming-Idaho-Montana

The end of our Dakota adventures had us staying in Laramie, Wyoming. Our plan from here was to explore Yellowstone and the Great Tetons and possibly Salt Lake City. Afterward we were going to spend a few days in Seattle before flying to Albany for Halley's cousin's wedding. However after looking at the anticipated weather (hello, snow) we decided to head straight for Missoula, Montana and then Seattle.

This meant a 13 hour car ride, not including stops for gas and whatnot. Luckily, we had just updated our iPods with NPR and had Water for Elephants as a book on CD. We hardly spoke the whole ride because we were too engrossed with the story. Very, very good.

We made a stop at the original Little America where they give out free postcards. Score. Little America grew into existence when a man was traveling and got stuck in a snow storm in the middle of nowhere. "Man I really wish there was food and lodging here." And the rest is history.

We had planned to stop for an early dinner on a reservation in Idaho to see a giant woman statue but upon further inspection of our surroundings just did a drive-by and got back on the highway.

Just plain weird, right?

After a peaceful night's sleep in Missoula, we set out in search of an ally cat sculpture. And we found it!

We just loved this thing!

Then is was on to Seattle. We have no desire to go into details on what we eat while on the road but we stopped at a Shari's, which we thought was a local diner. WRONG. It's a chain. A horrible, awful chain. This food is still making our stomachs turn. We just wanted to warn future/current west coast visitors.

Just say no.

Here are a few photos of our drive. How beautiful?!

This place claimed to be an incredible place for tourists to purchase gifts and had signs starting miles out. Needing gas and postcards, we decided to stop for a pretty large disappointment. Wah wah.

It had been raining for most of the day and suddenly we turned a corner and were greeted with this lovely view.

This is the closest we had ever been to wind turbines before. Huge!

Um, is that snow?

And then we made dinner for ourselves, complete with two weeks of NBC and ABC shows to catch up on.