Kansas to Kentucky ..... Then home

The countryside got flatter, then very flat, we found ourselves in the prairies, Kansas. It's a bit like the nullabor, in terms of flatness, but usually green, instead of grey. Very often, you see sipping bird type oil pumps in the field, as in this picture, I think they might only pump two or three barrels a day, but there are hundreds of them

We've been surprised by the reluctance of the locals to walk anywhere in the US. Here you see a 'drive up' ATM, and a 'drive in' pharmacy. We passed a 'drive in' restaurant to get to this spot, and we had to walk over grass and weeds to get to the (non drive in) restaurant where we were having dinner, because there was no footpath. This is very common, even in the bigger towns, no one walks anywhere, you feel quite threatened by the traffic when you do.

When we crossed out of Kansas into Missouri, the country began to change, and soon we were in hilly country, not huge snowy mountains as in the west, but rolling green hills. These are the Ozarks, home of the hillbilly, although such folk don't seem to be about these days. This picture is taken in the Mark Twain National Forest.

This is still in the Ozarks, a state park called Alley Springs, which has a great deal of information about pioneering in the eighteenth century, including this well maintained corn and wheat mill.

We crossed over the Mississippi at Chester, and thus into Illinois, as the river marks the border. I cheated with this picture, which is actually taken at Hannibal, Mark Twain's birthplace, a couple of days later.

We went north to Springfield, Illinois, to visit Abe Lincoln's house and his museum. Both are a big deal here, the museum in particular is really well done in an entertaining way, so much so that I didn't notice my 'museum heels', or that I had to pay an entrance fee. Such fees seem to be rare here, for places of national importance.
We also visited Abe's tomb, but I somehow didn't get a single picture for the blog, of any of this.

From Springfield, we went west to Hannibal on the Mississippi, as mentioned, all about Mark Twain. His name, or Tom Sawyer's, or Huck Finn's, is on most of the buildings in the town. This is a picture from Mark's steamboat captain days.

And this a picture from our room at the Rivers Edge Motel, Louisiana Missouri.

After a struggle with closed roads due to heavy rain around the river, we passed back into Illinois, then into Kentucky.
Kentucky is beautiful, hilly and green.

Once more, no pictures, my mind hasn't been on the job the last few days, my big brother Don, who has been unwell for a couple of years, suddenly became really unwell and passed away yesterday.

So, we're on the way home, last blog for this trip...

Wyoming and Colorado

Grand Teton National Park is immediately south of Yellowstone, so we were really pleased that it was part of our route.
These pictures show off the beautiful Tetons, which are visible in most of the park.

We spent a couple of nights camping in the park, and I was relieved it was possible even with Hannelore's wrist in plaster. It eases the accommodation expense, the scenery is better and we often eat more healthily.
Grand Teton National Park has even better scenery than Yellowstone, but no thermal activity, and less animals. At least, that's the way we found it.

After the park, we were soon out of Wyoming and into Colorado. We saw a lot of 'badlands' type scenery, but I didn't get a good blog picture. 

This one of the Colorado river shows a little bit of the scenery, maybe not the most typical.

This is high plains country, but we still went through a number of mountain passes, this is the Hoosier Pass, which is over 11,000 feet high, and would definitely have given us some trouble had we been riding.

We still are enjoying our meals, this is Hannelore in a typical bar where we had lunch. This was a hamburger, I actually had a bison burger, but, only the wimpy quarter pounder. With fries, of course.

Despite her dreamy look, we imbibed only water. I've found it's too hard to have a beer and then drive.

This is taken from our camping area near Pueblo, Colorado. We were pronouncing it 'pwayblo', but it seems more like 'perblo'. This is half way across on the trans America trail, I expected to make it this far on the bikes, maybe not much further.

However, with our car, we'll be going right across to the east coast, and as I write this, we are already half way across Kansas.

Yellowstone

This was a major highlight of the trip, it would have been great to camp in the park and to have been one of the few cyclists we saw doing that. Cars are the go here, with the odd tourist bus. As it was, it was wonderful anyway, but we had to drive out to stay in a strange little (expensive) room ten miles from the north entrance each night.

Here's one of our first sights of the park, inside the west entrance, you can see plenty of bison, which was exciting at first. Later, bison became a bit ho hum, you see them often. The rangers are very concerned about them though, because there are several gorings every year. They lumber along, but the rangers say they can do 35mph and leap over cars!

This is Old Faithful before it went off. When we arrived at 5pm, we heard someone say that it was predicted to erupt at 6:06pm, so Hannelore insisted we go over to the lodge and have an anniversary drink. I took this picture from there.

I took a better movie of the actual eruption, this picture is the bottom part, it was way too big from where we were standing to get a decent picture.

Imagine a panorama with this the top half, that's there best I can do, this doesn't do justice to what is actually an exciting event...

This picture is taken next day from a location near the Tower falls, looking down the Yellowstone River valley.

And this is a picture of the Tower Falls themselves.

We were surprised, and I was concerned to learn that Yellowstone sits atop an active volcano. Seething magma is apparently as little as three miles beneath our feet. This is one of thousands of fissures in the park, bubbling mud and steam caused by this proximity to the volcano. This one is called 'Sulfur Cauldron', and a bison is there keeping warm.

This is another famous falls, the Lower Yellowstone Falls, taken from Artist Point near Canyon Village.

On the way out, we saw this elk resting in the grass. Another dangerous animal according to the rangers. In fact in the visitors center, there is an entertaining video of them charging cars.

Next day, we fluked the ultimate, a mother bear and cubs, feeding by the road. This is a pretty rare event, I believe, so we felt quite privileged. We saw these near the Tower falls.

We got up early and spent the whole morning trying to see animals in the Lamar Valley. This is a hot spot for bears and wolves. We didn't see much though, a couple of wolves in the distance, some prong horn deer, and thousands of (boring) bison. However, the whole experience was very worth while, especially since we saw the bears.

We moved on, back up north, to Bozeman. This is Hannelore sampling a margarita Cadillac at a restaurant near our motel. You can see she's recovering well!

I anticipated I would be eating plenty of meat this trip, but there is normally something vego on every menu.

We've renewed our car hire here, and will go down to Pueblo, Colorado over the next week or so.

From Eugene to Montana

We left Eugene in our Nissan Versa, which is just like the Nissan Tiide we hired in New Zealand, except younger and more expensive.
In a trice, we made up the time we lost after the accident, it seems we'll have surplus time now, and we're not sure how to deal with it.
Here's a picture of us at Mount Washington, before the town of Sisters.

The scenery was beautiful throughout Oregon, snow topped mountains, green valleys, we either crossed mountain passes or followed fast flowing rivers, and in fact, that's how it has continued to date. 

There were some long hills, but not as steep as we have encountered in Europe, and I know we would have coped OK on the bikes.

This is a picture of a lake formed by damming the Ochuko River beyond Prineville.

We crossed the snake river which is the border into Idaho near Richland, then started to become aware of two histories which were signposted along the roads as we went. The first was the Lewis and Clark expedition which found the route that later formed the Oregon Trail, the second the battle the US army had with the Nez Perce Indians, who years before had helped Lewis and Clark. We found both stories moving and absorbing.

This is a picture of the Salmon River near the town of White Bird, which is named after one of the chiefs of the Nez Perce.

This picture near Graingeville, Idaho is also typical of the scenery we've been going through.

It didn't seem that we'd been in Idaho long, when we crossed the border into Montana.

Montana is aptly named, the mountains here are even higher, all snow topped, even though it is now summer. 

All the country we've passed through has had a gold mining history, this picture is in Nevada City, Montana, the buildings look Hollywood staged, but I'm sure they are genuine.

The home made five berry pie that we had in the bakery was definitely the real thing...

Next blog, which will show up soon, will be about Yellowstone, where we've just spent three days.