It was a long day of driving… We went from Rapid City, SD to Great Falls, MT

We got up at 7:00 and I had all the kids take baths since they hadn’t for a couple days. Then we packed up and had breakfast. We hit the road at 9:30 a.m. – a half an hour past our desired departure time.

Dane was feeling much better today, thankfully.

We went through the very last bit of SD, the tiny tip of WY and then Montana… ALL DAY. I must say I really don’t enjoy driving across MT. It is pretty in places, but overall, it is just boring- there isn’t much there, (at least on the highways we were on – we didn’t go much on the interestate – it was mostly 2 lane highways) and it is a big state! I took lots of cat naps to try to make the time pass. We encountered one construction zone where you turn off your car and wait for the pilot truck – that was a 15 min. wait – the sign said expect up to 30 min., so not bad I guess!

The most exciting part of the drive was highway 500. Our GPS directed us onto this highway, and I don’t recommend it! The first 7 miles were just fine… but then all the sudden it was mud roads, cattle guards, and free range cattle & wild horses! (we had cows on both sides of us at one point) Oh, and lots of deer too! Picture a windy dirt road, with huge potholes, places you might get stuck in from all the mud, extreme bumpy washboard sections etc. Matt always likes to take my cars off-roading and I don’t let him very often because he usually ends up breaking something, so this was his chance! (thankfully nothing broke) Funny we didn’t encounter 1 other car on the 22 mile stretch! There were a couple farms out there. We were trying to figure out what they do in the winter when there is snow.. You wouldn’t even be able to tell where the road was! Good thing we had plenty of gas and no emergencies because who knows how long we would have been stuck out there before a car passed! (oh and no cell phone service) I guess that is what OnStar is for! Thankfully we eventually came out on a civilized road again!

It was at this point that we realized that our GPS was still on central time, and we were really in mountain time, so we weren’t as behind as we thought we were! We instantly were able to take an hour off our trip! YIPPEE! We ended up in Lewistown, MT at 5:00 p.m. and had a nice dinner with Matt’s Grandma at a local hotel restaurant. The service was a bit to be desired, but the waitress was trying… she just kept making mistakes, but the food was good!

We left around 7:00 p.m. and ended up in Great Falls around 8:30 p.m. The kids were pretty much in the car all day, or required to sit at the restaurant, so they were a bit hyper when we got here, but they settled down fairly quickly and were asleep by 9:30 or so.

Tomorrow we plan to make it to Matt’s parents house in WA!

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 21st, 2009 at 10:47 pm and is filed under The Menu Mom Chit Chat. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.