Ok Ok Ok...

Fine I will put an end to my Blogging "vacation". It's true that I haven't made an entry in much too long. There are plenty of reasons, nothing bad, just not feeling that what I write is worth reading. I fear that my blog became a personal forum without interest to my readers but after getting a number of emails expressing disappointment at lack of new content I shall return to making some entries.

My last entry was about the start of my road trip to South Dakota. The trip was absolutely wonderful. Being in the car for hours and hours with the only questions being:

1) Do I want to listen to the song on the CD, if not press next
2) Do I want to stop and get gas.
3) Oh look every gas station in Montana has an attached mini-casino!!!

No reader will ever believe it but I only gambled 5 or 6 times on my trips through Montana. No really, I found it as much or, goddess forbid, more fun to just be driving.

Montana, Wyoming and South Dakota where absolutely beautiful.

My time in South Dakota was much more fun then I expected. I certainly knew I would have a good time seeing my sister and niece but the variety and quality of things to do in the greater Rapid City area. As crazy as this sounds I really recommend a visit there. Mt. Rushmore was fantastic, the scenery, Reptile Garden, caves and the many things I didn't get to on the short trip will provide things for every taste. One serious disappointment was Deadwood. Deadwood is a town that has become a bit of a gambling mecca in the area. There were lots of places to play but in general I was not impressed. In fact I was more impressed with the mini-casino in Montana gas stations (Lucky Lil's RULE) where better then the places I went in Deadwood.

One of the best parts of the trip was running into my parents on the drive to SD.

Although I started out on the evening of Wednesday 13th, my parents had left that morning. Just before I left the house I got a call from my Dad saying they had arrived in Missoula and were stopping for the night. I said I was just about to hit the road (7:30pm). My plan for the whole trip was just to drive until I couldn't or didn't want to and then stop for some sleep. Well I was able to drive until about 5:00am and that put me just outside of Missoula. Thankfully Dad mentioned they were staying at a Holiday Inn Express and Missoula not being a very large town it was easy to find. When I got there, after a hour or two of sleep in a rest area, there were my parents eating breakfast! It was very funny to run into them and it started everyone's day off really well. For much of the day we would run into each other at rest stops. It almost became a game of "who got there first". In the early afternoon I hit a rest stop and waited for a little while, I was driving faster so knew that I had gotten ahead of them. No parents, strange. I called and it turns out that during one of my gas stops I spent a little too much time at a video poker machine and they had, in fact, not only passed me but left the rest stop I was at a little while ago. They were planning on stopping for lunch somewhere but weren't sure where. Our little game had come to an end. I wished them the best on the rest of their trip and would see them once we all arrived in Rapid City.

I continued down the road for awhile trying to guess where they might have stopped for lunch. Thankfully Montana while large isn't heavily populated so when I got to a small town that had a restaurant I figured it was worth a few minutes to see if my parents had stopped there for lunch. As I pulled up to the restaurant my Dad comes out of the front door wondering how in the world I had found them! They had just ordered and I placed an order and we got to have lunch together.

After lunch we all continued on our journey but they stopped for the night in Billings while I continued on eastward. I told them to tell my sister, should they chat with her, that I was continuing on but wasn't sure how far I would get. At about 8:30p that evening I pull into her driveway. She hadn't expected me before 10 if at all that evening.

I SOOOO LOVE ROAD TRIPS. It had been ages since I had been on one and now I want all vacations to include a few thousand highway miles, rest stops, and mini-casinos in gas stations.