August 13- So this is it. The last blog of The Grand Adventure. Barring unforeseen circumstance (or arguably foreseen hangover-- we are hanging out with my family tonight), tomorrow night we will sleep in our own beds. Picking up where I left off, we spent our first night back in Eastern Daylight Time just north of South Bend, Indiana on Monday and headed over to Notre Dame Tuesday morning. The last time we were there was in about 1996, when a friend of mine got ...

August 9- On August 6 we drove late into the night and boondocked in the parking lot of a Walmart in Sioux Falls, SD (a good chunk of driving out of the way, particularly considering we didn't leave the Badlands till about 6 PM.August 7 was a big driving day, taking us from eastern SD across Minnesota and into Wisconsin. We did perhaps the most daring thing of the whole trip, having lunch at Mexican restaurant in a mall in rural Minnesota (actually, it wasn't bad...

August 6- Our first stop this morning was our last gasp in the Black Hills- Mt. Rushmore. I have to say, after all the hype, it was kind of smaller than I was expecting. Yeah, the sculptures are really cool, but believe me when I say that I felt a lot more love of our country in Yosemite, Yellowstone, or any one of the amazing places we've been to this trip. Honestly, our fundamental impression of Rushmore was annoyance. First of all, after seeing so many of the ...

August 5- Got up early in order to get to Sylvan Lake, one of the most popular recreation areas in the Black Hills, in time to get a parking space. Our plan for the day was a hike to the top of Mt. Harney, the highest point in South Dakota—and according to the sign at the top, if you travel east from there, the next time you reach a point as high is in the Pyrenees. You couldn't see quite that far, but the summit does offer an amazing 360 of the Black Hills reg...

August 3 - I don't normally blog the travel days, but we had a really neat one yesterday. We had an inauspicious start - it took three hours to go the 100 miles from our campground near the south entrance of Yellowstone, through the park and out the east entrance, to the town of Cody. In addition to regular park traffic, there was a bad accident in the Park (I now know what an overturned camping trailer looks like, and it ain't pretty), and western Wyoming seems ...