7/4/09

Happy 4th of July.
I woke up early after a very short night’s sleep. I decided to be nice to Kat this morning and walked over to the boys’ place so she could sleep a bit longer. We hung out and ate some breakfast until Kat called saying she was ready to hit the road.
We set out on our second biggest drive of our whole trip only shorter than our first day, Whitefish, Montana to Deadwood, South Dakota which is about 12 hours. It has been decided that our GPS seems to keep us off of main highways as much as possible and picks the more scenic routes that seem to get us where we are going faster anyways. The only problem is that there are very few gas stations on those back roads. We had a couple of stressful times where we were really testing how far we could go with the gas light on.
I think we would both agree that one of the highlights of the drive was after our gas light had been on for a good 20 miles we rolled into a little town and by little I mean very little. Our eyes brightened when we saw a gas station and then darken again when we saw that it was closed. Just to give you an idea of how small this town is…in the window of the gas station were flyers for people’s weddings. They don’t send invites, they just post it in the window of the gas station. Anyways, back to the story, so the gas station was closed so we pulled over to the side of the road to think out our situation. Kat saw a little old lady in the yard of the house we stopped by so she went to ask her if there were any other options. She had one. You see, Dale Jones, the owner of the gas station lives just up the block. Yup, 2 minutes later we were knocking on Mr. Jones’ front door…and laughing our asses of at the same time. Unfortunately, Dale was not home. We were so hoping he would be because begging a gas station owner to open his shop up for us on 4th of July would have made a better story but he wasn’t so we pressed on and made it another 17 miles to the next town where there was an open station where we coasted in on what fumes were left in our tank.
We also drove through some of the biggest thunder storms we have seen so far this trip. Luckily we purchased more duct tape on our last Walmart stop and we pulled off the road and did some much needed repairs to our plastic wrapped hole in the roof before we hit the storms. We had some good laughs while we were up on the roof of the Winnie taking turns taping and cutting and watching the vicious clouds get closer and closer. It didn’t seem like the safest thing to be doing since I think being up there made us the highest point and therefore a good lightning target but we made the best of the situation and got it fixed up.
The second highlight of the drive came late in the night on the Wyoming, South Dakota border. We came up to some construction where only one lane was open and we had a half hour delay while we waited for the pilot car to escort us through. That is where we met Phil. Phil is the man that holds the “stop” sign; since we were first in line we got to chat with him for a bit. There were some really big lights shining down above us and in the light of those lights was pretty much every bug from both Wyoming and South Dakota. It was crazy. We got out of the Winnie and ran around a bit. We jumped back and forth between the two states and took some pictures until we saw the lights coming our way and got back in the Winnie and pressed on.
We were fortunate in that we did get to see a lot of fireworks today in lots of different towns we passed through. We made it to Deadwood around 12:30 this evening and found yet another nice neighborhood to park in for the night. Which is good because sleep is much needed.