My campsite for the next night was definitely more beautiful. I spent a good deal of the day driving just south of Lake Sakakawea, a very large lake, and then drove below and on the largest earthen dam in the U.S., I think it's name is Garrison Dam, and then camped at a state campground on the lake. It is a huge campground and beautiful, well kept, manicured and I was the only person staying there. White tailed deer hopping around, I took a long walk, picked flowers, grasses and leaves for a vase. Nice!

These are the badlands of North Dakota, pretty awesome and also beautiful, but the shapes could be strange, provocative, eerie. From there I was driving on the interstate - not a happy thing for me. It was snowing, slushy for the most part, but still not great and the traffic was whizzing past me kicking up more stuff to throw at my windshield. It was tough driving and then I saw that there is a Beulah, North Dakota. I called Graham to see if I really needed to go there and he himmed and hawed about it, but, yes. So I did. The good thing is that it got me off the interstate and on to a more reasonable road. I got to Beulah just before dark but in time to catch the local hardware store still open. I was looking for a Beulah sticker, they of course had none. I did get some WD40 to not walk out empty handed. The man was nice, helpful, it was a really nice hardware store and had everything! He also told me that it was going to snow in the night. I found an abandoned - hard to say what it was - RV park in town and decided I would spend the night there. In the meantime the guy at the hardware store told me the local diner had Monday night German buffet night. Well...I didn't recognize most of the things but they did have excellent cabbage rolls. My dinner, including tea, with the senior discount came to $11.25. I then decided to watch Monday night football at a bar. That was interesting. A lot of men in this bar - probably 50 - 100, there was one open chair at the bar so I took that one. It turns out most of these men work in a cold mine near Beulah - Beulah is a big mining town and they also have a coal fired power plant. They also have a coal liquification plant where they turn coal into natural gas. Tom, the guy I was talking to was 27 and from Minnesota. He told me that most of the guys are from elsewhere, they make good money, they work 9 months out of the year because the mines are closed in winter. These are open pit mines with huge - huge earth moving equipment. I learned all kinds of things about Tom and from him. It was nice and on top of all that Minnesota won which makes people in North Dakota happy. I toured the liquification plant the next day. Interesting!

I'll show you my camping accommodations in the next pictures.

If any of you know how to work a blog, please let me know. It seems there is no ability to edit it once you have put pictures on and you can't move the pictures around. I'm tearing my hair out but am determined to get on with it. Anyway, I made it to just this side of North Dakota and was going to camp at the Badlands of Montana. It is a fantastic area and I drove almost to the end of the hairy road to get a great view of the whole place, but there was not one soul camping there and there was talk to snow in the night. I did not want to be moored in that godforsaken place!!! I found another AAA rated campground using my trusty little GPS - it was pitch black out and I had no idea where I was going. The campground was no beauty and someone should write a letter to AAA (but not me). It stormed that night, limbs fell on Hildegard and we got out of there pretty early in the morning.

I finally crossed the border into North Dakota - virgin territory for me - and I was happy as a little piggy. Got gas, was told there was going to be 2 feet of snow later that day so I thought I would move along quickly. But -- the Theodore Roosevelt National Park was just a few miles away and that couldn't be missed. These are the North Dakota badlands and they are beautiful. I drove the 36 mile loop and saw antelope, white tailed deer, and bison. All the grasses have turned color and the leaves on the trees were in full autumn. I told the ranger there that Graham and Aubrey were National Park Rangers and she was overjoyed. It was really a beautiful place to be and in the summer they have musicals and do a full blown tourist thing there.

On to the rest of the world and came upon Ashland, MO while trying to avoid freeways. Ashland looked different, but I stopped at the gas station there to find out the road I wanted to take was a very bad, widy gravel road along a river with possibilities along the way. I made the wise decision to continue on to Broadus. Ashland is at the foot of a pretty nice mountain in the middle of the grasslands.

Montana and North Dakota

I left you all in West Yellowstone and the beauty of Montana. Montana, as you travel towards the east, is less and less mountainous and eventually looks like eastern oregon. My first stop after camping at Big Timber was Little Big Horn (Custer's last stand). I wanted to be where the white man got beaten by the Indians and it felt good to be there, but I went back the next morning and the sadness of the place came to me - a lot of people died there, young men, old men, fighting for a piece of land that to this day is marginally inhabited. We go to war for???

Hoping This Works

You all have my latest report in an email I sent, now I'm trying out the blog. The Grand Tetons and Yellowstone are so totally beautiful and interesting and they really aren't that far away. If you take a two week vacation you can more than see everything and have time to relax. I didn't send any pics of Old fFaithful or the famous lodge at Old Faithful, but here they are.