"Get in the car, or perhaps you don't want to see the second largest ball of twine on the face of the earth, which is only four short hours away?"

"This means something, this is important"

Arguably, the part of the trip I have been the most excited for was today. I have wanted to go to Devils Tower for over 15 years, whenever I saw Close Encounters of the Third Kind for the first time. When I was in SD in '94 with Boy Scouts we were frustratingly close, I never thought I'd be back. It was well worth the wait. I was relieved to find no military personnel or dead livestock on the winding roads approaching the tower (I actually said that same comment out loud and got silence from Alie. I'm gonna assume it was because she didn't get the reference, not because she is ashamed to be associated with me at times... Yep, that must be it.). The iPod was pumping out the Williams score to Close Encounters, I don't care if it was uber geeky, I had goose bumps.

We Didn't see this:
But, what we did see was still really awesome...
After we left, I realized we didn't get gas when we departed Gillette and we had like no gas. Every town we went through didn't have gas. That was a fun few miles of apprehension before we filled up.

Because I am a sad, simple person at times, I had no problem with a 200mi detour just to cross into a state and turn around. Looking at a map, I noticed the Geographic Center of the U.S. was on the way to ND. Right up my alley.

We had to drive 8mi on a gravel road just to get to this:


Alie wrote more about how I took these pictures, lets just say I had to dodge some cow pies.

Tomorrow is like a comparative commute for us driving wise, a slight audible on the Google Map, I think we are going to Mt. Rushmore tomorrow instead of Wed. I'm sure you were all holding your breath on that one. Also, at some point, I am going to put all of our pictures into a Flickr account, maybe not until we get back, I'm not sure. We have a ton, 135 of Yellowstone alone.

Day 4: Wall, SD to Keystone, SD

I don't have actual mileage for today because of bad internet (I'm sitting in the mighty Mustang writing this...) but, we left at 11am and got into Wall at 10:30pm. I know we drove over 400 total miles. Getting easier and easier. In closing, in perhaps the most stunning moment of the trip thus far...

I allowed (actually, requested thank you very much) a picture of myself to be taken.