I am finally telling the story of how I got to Montana. That makes it sound much more important and serious than it actually is, but the trip was exciting, and as you will soon be able to tell, very beautiful.
The first day of the journey took Manny and I from San Antonio to Albuquerque. As you can imagine, there are not too many pictures from this leg, since as much as I love West Texas, it’s not the most exciting landscape. To sum up: there was a lot of sand and sky, and the wind just about blew the brats off the charcoal BBQ pit we stopped at to heat up lunch. However, we did stop to gaze upon the world’s second largest roadrunner in Fort Stockton (Manny is in front for scale):

Manny and the world's 2nd largest roadrunner in Fort Stockton
From there we drove through Roswell (not as fabulous as I had hoped, though the UFO shaped McDonald’s was a nice touch) and into Albuquerque. After waking up bright and early the next morning, we drove into Santa Fe and had a classic New Mexico breakfast at Tecolote Cafe (sooo good – put Christmas chili on anything and I’ll eat it), and then headed up to Taos. We bummed around town for a bit, and then took a short out-of-the-way drive to the Rio Grande gorge to check it out:

The Rio Grande gorge outside of Taos
It’s hard to do justice to the actual size of the gorge. We also saw 3 bighorn sheep there (my pictures didn’t come out very well, they were down near the bottom) and there are only about 300 of them in all of New Mexico. And here is another picture just because I like it, and because it sums up my love for northern New Mexico:

Big sky country
From there we drove back up I-25 to Colorado Springs and spent the night so we could wake up early again the next morning to drive into Rocky Mountain National Park. Originally, we were planning on going the back way up through the entire park, but thanks to my weather nerd, Manny, we ruled that out due to bad weather and decided to go in via Estes Park. This ended up being a great decision, because as we got up to about 11,500 feet, this is what everything looked like:

Fog worse than San Francisco
Between zero visibility (literally, I could not see more than 20 yards in front of the car) and no frame of reference while close to what I knew from memory was a steep precipice, we decided to head back out of the park, thankful that the awesome guy at the gate let us in for free with my new National Park Service intern status.
This left us with lots of extra time in Fort Collins, and we got to recharge and plan the detour through South Dakota that we were both really looking forward to. The next day we got up bright and early (pattern, yes – it’s still going on right now) and drove up through the rolling grassy hills of eastern Wyoming into the rolling grassy hills of South Dakota. By the time we saw the Black Hills, they were a welcome sight indeed.
First stop in South Dakota was a sandwich place in Hot Springs (awesome food on this trip – why anyone sticks to the chains when they don’t have to is beyond me) and then onto Wind Cave National Park. Here we saw our first buffalo of the trip, including one we have since christened “Jowlie” because he was having a grand old time scratching his face on a guardrail and slapping his jowls against it.

Jowlie
Also, an antelope posed for us. This was the beginning of what would end up being a series of insane animal encounters that are still happening. In what is now referred to as the Miracle of South Dakota, I avoided hitting two deer and a turtle that all decided to cross the road at a very disadvantageous time. All I can say is that the wildlife out west is very lucky that I react to even the smallest shadows that move in my line of sight when driving.

Photogenic antelope.
From Wind Cave we drove through the Black Hills to Rapid City, contemplated checking into the hotel, and then decided that, surely, there was enough daylight yet to get out to the Badlands – and there was! Sunset in the Badlands is truly beautiful, and everyone should experience it at least once.

The Badlands near sunset. A whole lot of sandstone.

Badlands - you can see the striping in the formations here.

Jagged edges of the Badlands.

Manny at the Badlands.

Sunset at the Badlands.
Oh, and before we went to the Badlands, we saw the world’s largest groundhog!!

World's largest groundhog!!
The next day we went to Mount Rushmore – here are the Presidents under the Texas flag.

Mount Rushmore.
And after the world’s largest groundhog, here’s a real groundhog who is super cute :)

Groundhog!
And here’s Devil’s Tower from a distance, from the parking lot of the place we had buffalo burgers out in BFE, WY. It’s a huge rock born of volcanic activity – and it really is HUGE – that picture doesn’t really do it justice.

Devil's Tower.
It got darker as we drove through the Crow reservation and into Montana – through Billings, Livingston, and finally to Bozeman where we camped for the night. From there we drove into the park, and that is another entry that is on its way very soon!
All in all, here’s how far we drove (not including short stops and detours that added another 500 miles onto the journey, necessitating an oil change the week after getting here).
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