I had a great birthday today.  It started out by getting woke up with a phone call from my brother, Jim.  He forgets that I don’t work in the summer and thinks I’m up at 6:30 every morning.  But it was the thought that counts.  Then this afternoon the girls & I went and got pedicures.  That was so relaxing and fun.  I love it when the girls get all tickly while having their feet massaged.  So cute!!

Tonight, Nate made my favorite pizza….pizza margaritta.  It reminds me of Napa Valley, CA…one of my favorite places I’ve visited.  After dinner I had a couple of presents to open.  One was the newest Janet Evonovich book and a huge surprise was a brand new Ipod Nano!!  It’s orange, which looks really cool.  I have the old Ipod mini (which is huge & they don’t even make anymore), so this one holds over a thousand songs which will be nice.  Now I won’t have to take off one album to put on a new one.  I always have a hard time with that because I love all my music!

Thanks everyone for making my day so special!!

We got home around 1:00 today and we were all very happy to see our house.  We are used to such long drives, that four hours today was nothing.  We all had such energy when we got home.  Nate mowed the lawn, I went grocery shopping and started on the laundry.  We decided that it would be nice to have a home cooked meal, so Nate grilled some chicken.  It was nice not having to order from a menu.  I think we’re all going to sleep well tonight in our own beds. 

I hope you enjoyed reading my daily blog of our vacation.  I had fun sharing all of our fun activities.  I also have 150 pictures to share….if anyone is interested!!!  I’ll be scrap booking for a year on this one.

We made it all the way across North Dakota in one day!  Wow….that was so boring!  At least we had sunshine today.  We are so ready to be home tomorrow.  We’re getting an early start so that we’ll be home by early afternoon.  It’s been a great trip and the girls are the best travelers.   Not one complaint from either of them the entire trip. 

This picture  is from our first day.  We stopped at a historical marker in South Dakota.  This was where Lewis & Clark camped while on their journey.  The Missouri River is below. 

We saw our first rainfall today….and lots of it.  It was okay though, because we were done sightseeing and needed to drive 7 hours across Montana and into North Dakota.  The rain wasn’t too bad until our last 20 minutes of driving.  It really came down hard.  We needed a good carwash.  Once we got to our hotel, we dropped off our suitcases and headed to the hot tub and pool.  It was a great way to relax those tense muscles.

The picture above is an elk that we saw in Yellowstone.  I could’ve opened my car door, walked about five steps and petted him on those huge antlers.  Instead, I chose to take the safe route and roll down my window and take the shot from inside the car.  He was cool though.  I was hoping to see a moose at some point, but this was as close to that as I got.

Tomorrow we vacation in lovely Fargo, MN.  I see a hot tub and swimming pool in our future!

We spent our day in Montana today at the Museum of the Rockies.   This museum was filled with dinosaur bones that have been found here in Montana, some of them as recent as 2006.  The picture above is “Mike the dinosaur”.  Megan & Kelly said he reminded them of the dinosaur in the movie, “Night of the Museum.”  They have the largest displays in the country.  It took us three hours to go through this museum.  One very impressive display was the actual bones of a T-Rex layed out in the same way they were found.  It was missing it’s tail because it was found near a river and the water had washed away the tail bone and some toe bones.  The funny part about this enormous dinosaur was that it was discovered by a woman who was reading by the river while her husband was fishing!  She found a few bones that didn’t look familar to her, so she brought the bones to this museum and they told her what she had found.  Can you imagine!  She got to hang out at the “dig site” while archeologists found the rest of the dinosaur.  They also have the largest skull of a T-Rex ever found.  One tooth was larger than my hand!  The museum also included a Native American section, a treasure hunting section, and an old transportation/home life area.  The girls just couldn’t imagine life with a rotary phone!   They kept asking me, “How does that work mom?”  Ha! 

The museum was only a block away from the Montana State University (MSU), so Nate & I were curious to see their campus.  It was really nice with great architecture and a scenic backdrop of the Rocky Mountains and beautiful hillsides.  Nate said it looked a lot different than Oshkosh!  I agreed, Stout didn’t look this good either.  We tried pointing this out to Megan, but she wasn’t too interested.  She already has her heart set on going to college in Colorado.  I guess that would be cool too.

Since it’s our last night before heading back east tomorrow, we decided to have a nice dinner here in Montana.  We felt the urge to eat cattle!  Prime Rib for the parents, and hamburgers & meatballs for the girls.  We tried to get Kelly to eat a Bison burger, but she just couldn’t get herself to eat what she’s been seeing for the last three days.

Tomorrow we leave and head for North Dakota.  I’m expecting that the drive won’t be as picturesque as we’ve been seeing.  But no more winding roads!!!!!

I saw my favorite spot in Yellowstone today.  It was at a spot called Artists’ Point.  It was located in the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone.  This spectacular view consisted of a waterfall, colored rocks or cliffs, and pine trees all around.  I can’t wait to show you some pictures.  This was a view that you’d never get tired of looking at.  I loved it!

We also went “off roading” today.  Kelly wanted to see the Blacktail Plateau and in order to do so, we needed to drive down a one-way dirt road for 7 miles.  Unfortunately we didn’t see any wildlife on this trail, but we did end up getting quite a dirty car!

The wildlife was out today.  We spotted a grizzly bear, elk, and more buffalo.  We also saw a bird called an osprey and it’s nest sitting way up on a rock in the Grand Canyon.  It had a baby in it’s nest.  We’re glad we brought the binoculars.  The last thing we did today was to hike 500 feet down a trail to get a closer view of the Upper Falls in the Canyon.  Going down wasn’t so bad….but walking back up was tough!  We are at an elevation of 8,000 feet, so trying to breathe is different around here.  I was huffing like a crazy lady by the time I got to the top!  ha!

We’re back in Gardiner, Montana tonight.  Not sure what we’re doing tomorrow, but I’m sure I’ll have something to write about tomorrow night.

We spent our entire day in Yellowstone National Park today.  This park is so huge that you could spend two weeks in here and still not see everything!  We made so many stops along the way and saw so many beautiful things.  One of our first stops was to get out and spend some time looking at Yellowstone Lake.  It’s a very large lake and very cold water.  We had fun skipping stones into the lake and Kelly took one home for yet another souvenir.   On our drive we saw many, many herds of buffalo.  At one stop, we were looking out our side windows at them when Nate decided to start driving and realized when he looked back that there was a buffalo right behind our trunk!  That surprised us!

Our main destination today was Old Faithful.  When we got there, we found that the geyser had just erupted, so we had about an hour to spend.  We had lunch, bought souvenirs and got to Old Faithful just in time to watch it explode.  That was pretty cool. (see picture above)

Our last stop was at Mammoth Hot Springs.  These springs smell really nasty.  There is actually sulphuric acid in the water and when this steams, the smell is very strong.  It reminded me of when Megan launched her rocket, that burning smell.  Chokes you a little and gets up your nose. 

Tonight we are in Montana!!  We are just outside the northern gate of Yellowstone Park.  Tomorrow we are heading back into Yellowstone for another day of sightseeing.  I’ll let you know what we see!  Weather for tomorrow is sunny and 75.  Yay, shorts again!!

Today we started out by traveling through the Black Hills National Forest in South Dakota and then out to Wyoming.  Our first stop was to see Devils Tower just as you enter Wyoming.  What a cool rock this was to see.  They’re were even climbers on it as we sat and watched them attempt to climb this enormous rock.

We decided that we will never want to live in Wyoming.  Dawn, you may enjoy it here because there are prairie dogs everywhere!  It was a pretty ugly ride for the first three hours and then something beautiful happened.  We came over a hill and right in front of us were the Rocky Mountains!  The girls thought they were clouds because they are so high up in the sky.  Our next excitement came about another two hours later when we had to drive through Big Horn National Forest.  This was another one of those spectacular sights that everyone should get a chance to see.  I was very nervous during this drive because we were driving on a two lane highway up and down through the mountains with plenty of hairpin turns and very steep roads.  It felt like we were on a rollercoaster ride and you all know how much I love rides.  Uuggg.  But I didn’t let on to anyone that I was scared.

Tonight we went to the local Cody Wyoming Stampede Rodeo.  We saw bull riding, bucking bronco’s, roping the cows and barrel racing.  It was pretty exciting stuff and luckily no cowboys or cowgirls were hurt.  The girls even got a chance to go down into the corral and chase three small calves for a chance to win a prize.  They didn’t win but had fun chasing these animals and trying to get the ribbon off of their tails.  Very funny to watch!

Tomorrow we head for Yellowstone National Park.  The weather looks bright and sunny once again.  We sure picked a beautiful week to travel.

What a great day we had today.  We started out by visiting Bear Country USA.  It is a wildlife park in which you drive through the 30 mile park.  There are between 120-140 brown & black bears in this park.  They actually come right up to the car and walk across the road.  You are told to stop for the bears and keep the windows up!  We made sure to follow this rule.   There were other wildlife to see as well.  Such as, bison, big-horn sheep and an arctic cat.  It was a fun drive.

Next we were were off to Mount Rushmore.  We were so amazed at how big this rock sculpture really is.  Once you’re there, you can’t imagine how this amazing carving was achieved.  It took 14 years to complete and it’s well worth looking at.  We also walked a hefty hike through a paved trail.  It was a lot of stair climbing…up and down.  We treated ourselves to ice cream after that.  ha!   On our way out of town, we stopped at a rock store.  Kelly likes to collect rocks and we all found this to be a fun store to stop at.  We all left with a souvenir or two.   For dinner, we stopped in Keystone.  This is a little town outside of Mount Rushmore.  It’s designed like a western town with lots of little shops and even an emporium.  The girls wanted to go in there because they like the movie, Mr McGoriums Wonder Emporium.

Tomorrow we leave South Dakota and head for Cody, Wyoming.  This is a six hour drive and we’ll be stopping once to see Devil’s Tower.  The weather looks good and a bit cooler.  That’s a good thing because we all got a little sunburn on our faces today.

It was a long and successful first day of vacation.  The first 3/4 of the drive consisted of farms, farms, cows, farms, some rolling hills, then back to farms.  That was really boring!  Then we came to the badlands and ohhhh, the drive was gorgeous!  We drove through the Badlands National Park.  It’s about a 30 mile drive that took us about an hour & half to go through.  There were so many “scenic” look- outs that you couldn’t help stopping and getting out to see the spectacular view.  The girls loved climbing on the rocks and looking over the edge.  Sometimes a little too far for my liking.  We also spotted some wildlife while in the park.  Nate found a deer, I spotted the cute prairie dogs, and we were really lucky to see many mountain goats just hanging around high up in the hills.  Really neat!!

We are now in Rapid City, South Dakota.  We stopped for dinner, got our hotel room and the girls did some swimming.  We are all very tired and looking forward to some sleep tonight and then off for some more fun in South Dakota tomorrow.  The forcast is sunny and mid 80’s!  Perfect for sightseeing.