I have to quickly blog, even though there's nothing much to say about where I am. I just got the bus from Denver, Colorado to Billings, Montana... and I've never had such a good coach in my life!

It's sort of a Greyhound service, but it's provided by a separate company. We had an almost-brand new Mercedes-Benz coach with Blaupunkt DVD system, and we watched movies for the whole 13 hour journey. It included, appropriately, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I say 'appropriately' because the rock mass in the movie is the Devil's Tower National Monument in Wyoming - the state through which we were travelling at the time.

I absolutely loved the countryside we were going through too. It was what I picture as the West - vast expanses of mostly open, treeless plains rising up into mountains on the horizon. It made me want to jump on a horse and gallop off. Or if not that, then it made me want to watch City Slickers again.

The bus driver we had for most of the way was really nice, again unusual for a Greyhound service, and he wore a cowboy hat and string tie. I wondered if this was just uniform but the second driver we had didn't wear that so I guess it was the personal preference of the first driver.

When we arrived at Billings I checked into my hotel, called the Dude Rancher Hotel. It's an old wooden building. Inside the room looked fairly typical of a hotel/motel except it looked like a log cabin because of all the exposed wood. I was pleasantly surprised to see the bath had whirlpool jets. Usually I can't even fit myself in the bath, never mind have a jacuzzi. So I just had to have a bath!

The next day I picked up my rental car. I got a Kia Optima, which seems to me to be a lot bigger than the compact class I had booked, but I wasn't complaining about a free upgrade. Now to see what this baby can do as it takes me around the Rocky states of Montana, Wyoming and Idaho.