Finally got DSL yesterday! It's still not as fast as good old Stanford internet, but it's much better than dial-up. Thank you, Patrick, for setting it up. To begin with, here's Patrick jumping on bubble wrap. That was probably on Wednesday, before we took our 38 boxes to FedEx. We left on Saturday morning ...
Day 1: We drove out of California, through northern Nevada (which was pretty boring, I have to say), and into Salt Lake City just as the sun was setting. I was impressed by how big it was--but I was disappointed that the Salt Palace wasn't really made of salt (it's just a normal conference center). We visited Temple Square on Sunday before taking off.
Got to Yellowstone in the evening, set up camp, and went for a swim in Lewis Lake. It was cold, with pokey rocks on the bottom, but it was very clean! It felt good after sitting in the car all day, too. After that, we went to see the hot spot around Old Faithful. Walked around the boardwalk, chatted with other visitors, and saw Old Faithful erupt.
The next day, we hung around Yellowstone some more. Saw the huge, 300-foot Lower Falls, and the river winding through Yellowstone Canyon. Lots of bison, too. It rained and even hailed, but we didn't mind that much. The mudpots were really smelly, though! We drove on, getting no service and free pizza at a very busy Pizza Hut in Cody, Wyoming.
South Dakota was an exciting state. Made the obligatory stop at Mount Rushmore, which was sort of mind-boggling, then discovered Badlands National Park, which was a surreal and gorgeous combination of prairie (so much grass! and groundhogs!) and sudden gorges full of mud mountains. We walked along the weird fossil trail and saw the sunset.
The Mitchell Corn Palace ("It's a-maize-ing!") was another South Dakota treasure. The whole building is covered with gigantic corn mosaics. We stopped for lunch and experienced the first in a series of vomit spottings. Stoicly, he (the vomiter, an elderly gentleman) turned to his wife and commented on a shop display: "Hey, $6.75! That's a pretty good price for a T-shirt!"We got to Mount Vernon, IA, that same day. It was a good break; we'd gotten really sick of driving, and our charming car pastimes (for example, listening to Richard Russo read some of his short stories and learning Portuguese and Mandarin from language CDs) had gotten really old. In Mount Vernon, we had dinner with Patrick's mom, Mary, and took a short walk around the town before bed. The next morning, we went to Palisades Kepler, a nice local park, then drove to Chicago! I'll describe that more in my next post ...
2 comments:
In case you were wondering about the other vomit spottings, there were two:
1) A kid at Noodles, Etc., one of our new favorite cheap eats. He was sitting silently with two very quiet friends before The Incident, and actually he threw up so quietly that I wasn't even sure what had happened until I peeked. Besides upchucking, he also wet himself. Ick.
2) A dog. We were walking back from the Museum of Science and Industry, where we had carefully avoided the Body Worlds feature ("An Anatomical Exhibition of Real Human Bodies") because it sounded too gory. So on the way home, of course, we saw a dog in the middle of his walk (leash, owner and all) spewing yellow-green muck on the grass. Ick, ick ick.
That's it.
i <3 the pictures nicole!
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