The next day, we drove from Powell, Wyoming to my cousin's house in South Dakota.
Something that was fun about the trip was to see how things are different in every state. We haven't really left our state very much since the kids were born (except Oregon and Idaho) so we're not used to awesome things like getting to drive 80 mph!!! Washington's speed limit is 70 max. Probably we just have too many people on the roads and don't have as many long straight stretches. We kept calculating how much time we were saving going 80 rather than the 70 at home.
There was one place, however, we did NOT go 80. We drove across the Bighorn Mountain Pass. Wow, that was quite the climb up and then quite the drive down. So, so steep and so many switchbacks. It was CRAZY. Beautiful, but a bit terrifying.
I knew it was going to be like that so I was nice and let Jeremy drive it. He always needs to keep his driving skills in tip-top shape so I'm sure he appreciated this driving adventure.
When we got almost to the top, the kids had to use the bathroom. By some stroke of luck, there was a rest area there. Here's a picture I took. There was some smoke in the distance so you can't really see how high up we were, but it was high.
There was such a cute little rest room up there. And it was SO QUIET. I am a big fan of quiet, so I just wanted to stay there. I think we met under 5 cars our whole trip up the pass. For some reason, people don't seem to want to drive that way. Huh.
Here was the view driving across the top of the pass. So beautiful and green and just cows out there grazing.
When we got to the bottom, I took over the driving and drove us over to South Dakota. I really liked driving in Wyoming. 80 mph and the drivers were so relaxed there.
Welcome to South Dakota! I had been to South Dakota once when I was a kid to see Mt. Rushmore. This was like 25 years ago I think. My cousin Norma lives in the Black Hills area so we stopped for a visit. I hadn't seen her in 20 years!! That seemed unbelievable to me. She seemed just the same to me though. It was like no time had passed.
She had kites there for the kids. The wind was just right that day and the kids were really able to get some good kite flying in!! It was really neat. At home, our kites are usually kind of duds even though it's always windy. Apparently, South Dakota is awesome for kite flying.
The other neat thing about South Dakota is that you are allowed to feed deer from your porch! The kids had a lot of fun. Both nights we were there, they rushed out after dinner to feed the deer.
This is the kids playing with the dry ice from our cooler. That stuff is neat. We tried an experiment on this trip to see if it would keep stuff frozen. It definitely worked. However, we were spending $10 every few days on dry ice to keep a $3 pack of frozen burritos frozen....
So Jeremy and the kids did fun experiments and Norma and Donald and I watched the science that was occurring. I think in this picture, they had added dish soap to see what happened.
Donald and Norma took us to look at an open pit gold mine! It was really huge. The kids liked watching the dump trucks drive up and down. The trucks looked really tiny, but we know they were huge!
That evening, the kids got to go riding on the quads. They had a fabulous time out riding!
Nathan got to learn to drive!!
They had a pond the kids checked out.
We rode around until it got pretty dark. It was really a fun time.
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