Today was a long day of driving with nothing on our agenda but getting to Shelby, Montana. It began at 8 AM and 73 degrees, and the temperatures quickly rose to 81 and stayed there all day long. Today we drove through miles and miles of prairie. I struggled to find something, anything, that would inspire me to take photos, because in the prairie, there is little that provides a focal point to make a photo interesting. It is just a lot of flat land that goes on for miles and miles. I was anxious to see what my new camera would do, but this was not the day.

Understand, I am not saying that the ride did not have beautiful vistas to see, because it did. Like yesterday, we drove through farmlands, with pastures growing mostly grass, and the season for baling the grass is now, so even though it is Sunday, the farmers were out there cutting and baling their crops.  And in addition to hay, there were fields of wheat and barley and perhaps even oats, though mine are uneducated eyes and it all looks pretty much like the same thing to me. And so, riding along, the fields are made up of patches of yellow and gold and green, all laid out by some scheme that only the farmer understands. Some fields were freshly cut, others waiting to be cut and still others only partially grown. And the grains move gracefully in the breeze, and create a wave over the field like water on the surface of the ocean…flowing and free.

We saw a lot of cows today. At one place, we saw three adults and about a dozen youngsters and I thought, this must be day care, for this many cows could not have born this many calves. And we chuckled about it. And we saw a lot of horses…graceful creatures with their beautiful sleek bodies and legs…grazing in the pastures while the wind blew softly through their manes.

And we found the railroad once again and were with it for most of the day. Those headed east were carrying containers, many from the orient, and those headed west were pulling box cars with urban art painted all over their sides. We followed the railroad, crossed over it and under it. And I thought, if only more companies would use the rails, then driving on the highways would be oh so much more pleasant.

Most of the day we were passing through Indian Reservations. We stopped briefly in Wolf Point where the gas station store "Town Pump" had a casino on the other side of the building. There were many casinos along the way.

The further west we drove, the more desert-like the terrain became, with yellow grass and silver sage the only adornment. And we crossed the Milk River many times as it was winding its way through the area. We always knew where it was because of the trees that grow beside it and nowhere else.

Oh, and did I mention grain elevators? We saw A LOT of those, old and new, all along the railway, poised to dispense grain into the rail cars that stopped for a fill-up.

We landed in Shelby around 4 PM and began preparing for tomorrow when we will drive through Glacier National Park on the “Going to the Sun” road through the mountains. The weather is not looking promising, but I am hoping that that changes before we get there.