Dream Vacation

What is your dream vacation?


Does it involve spending endless hours in a car with your 14 month old, your husband, and your mother, when gas prices are at an all time high?


Does it involve staying in a different stinky motel every night in two double beds with your husband, baby, and mother?

One of our more interesting accommodations.

Does it involve visiting super fund sites and abandoned mining towns in searing heat, running out of gas on unpaved reservation land and having to buy a gallon of gas from a farmer's wife?

The Berkley Pit Butte, MT a big ol' hole full of toxic ground water.

Me neither. But that is just what we have been doing for the last two weeks and we had lots of fun.


We took a road trip around the western states on a surreptitious route to a wedding in Boise. We bought a national parks pass in the winter in a hopes that it would force us into visiting a few parks in the summer, and it worked.


We visited Glacier, Yellowstone, the Tetons, and Craters of the Moon. We stayed in a mansion in Butte, MT, visited the national mining museum, saw a couple of ghost towns, and visited a couple of zoos.

On the Oregon Trail

gramy in the privy

in the privy

Storm clouds in Nevada City

Turns out the country is big-real big.

The Tetons

Storms on the Plains

Evening in Yellowstone

I guess I knew that, but being in a car with your mother, son and husband, really drives the point home.


I kid-we all got along really, quite well.


There was lots of potty humor to pass the time, and plenty of elitist babble to make ourselves feel better about our place in the world- not hard to do when you are looking at museum exhibits of fifty different kinds of barbed wire.



The moral of the story, though...


the earth is an incredibly beautiful place and every corner of it is chalk full of people and places that are worth knowing and learning about.


Sometimes you have to go a long way to learn about what is right in front of you.

Jamie ridin' the rails