Category: Destinations
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Day 301 – St. Xavier, Montana – “My lands are where my dead lie buried.”
I’m sitting in a small hunting cabin in St. Xavier, Montana in the middle of the Crow reservation, population: 83. We dipped down off of I90 at Billings across a dry landscape and flat farmlands. We hadn’t given it much thought. An AirBnB in a convenient location with room to park the Rialta and…
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Day 295 – Grand Teton National Park
[Mile 1,820 to 2,200 ] Directly below Yellowstone National Park sits Grand Teton National Park. The two parks nearly touch but are separated by a narrow stretch called the John D. Rockefeller Jr. Memorial Parkway. Exiting the south entrance there’s not even an entry gate into Teton. Only the familiar park sign. The…
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Day 292 – Yellowstone National Park
[Mile 1,348 to 1,820] It’s hard to visit a place so majestic as Yellowstone without reflecting on the boundless cruelty and hubris imported to this country. In 1800 there were over 60 million bison that once roamed from Alaska to the Gulf of Mexico and from New York the Pacific Ocean. By 1840,…
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Day 288 to 291 – Driving from Glacier to Yellowstone
[Mile 980 to 1,348] Canola fields in Montana. As we set out across Montana the canola fields were spectacularly in bloom. The brightest 50’s kitchen yellow tucked under a fluffy cloud sky with mountains all around in the distance. That night we stayed in a hotel in Missoula to do some laundry and…
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Day 285 – Glacier National Park
[Mile 630 to 980] When I was young I took a road trip around the country with a friend, living in his Honda Prelude, we’d open our paper atlas each day, look for a place that sounded cool, then we’d drive there, all summer. We drove from New Orleans to Canada, all the…
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Day 283 – Driving from Spokane to Glacier National Park
[Mile 335 to 630] We started the day in Spokane from our campground. I made a quick detour to grab a photo of the giant milk-jug shaped building in town then we drove all the way through Idaho (stopping briefly in Wallace) to Montana and to our new campground in Cabin City Forest…
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Day 282 – Spokane, WA – Driving across Washington State
[Mile 130 to 335] Washington is a very unusual state. Along the western coast the weather is extremely wet and mild. The high mountains trap the moisture and creates a special climate that’s rarely too warm or too cold. But once over the mountains, there is a long rain shadow where moisture from…
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Day 281 – North Bend, WA – Twin Peaks!
[Mile zero to 130] This is it! We officially left the nest and started on our US road trip (after a bit of rethinking due to COVID shutting down the world). We wanted something light for our first day out so we drove down to Seattle to the beginning of I90 and drove…
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Day 161 – Granada, Spain – The last stronghold of Moorish Europe
Granada sits in the south of Spain at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains at the confluence of the Darro, the Genil, the Monachil and the Beiro rivers. It was the last Moorish stronghold to fall to Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile (the Catholic Monarchs) during the great Reconquista…
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Day 155 – Seville, Spain – The orange blossom dream I wished would never end.
Thin winding streets lined with orange trees, the smell of orange blossoms surrounding you, ancient tile-work facades on brightly painted buildings in ochre and curry and mustard. The sheer ornateness of the city suggests a history much larger than the city seems. The sky dominated by the largest gothic cathedral in Europe. Where the…