Post date: Jun 28, 2015 4:13:49 AM
The weather today was over 100 degrees. We left the hotel by 8:11 and by an hour later things were already heating up. Luckily for us, Lola has vents below the dashboard along with the triangular ones beside the roll down windows which added a great deal more breeze. We brought plenty of water bottles with us, each filled with ice though it soon melted as well as little suction cup screens that we would stick to the windows. At one point we stopped at Orange Julius for a cool beverage, another effort to beat the heat.
At Custer's Last Stand there were others trying to cool down, namely a little dog named Oreo. I walked back from the soldier's monument, spotting a little dog lapping vigorously out of a little grey bowl. As a dog lover I had to stop, holding out my fingers for the little pup to sniff. I struck up a conversation with Oreo's owner, a woman from Iowa. She and her family were driving to Yellowstone National Park, one of many things on her daughter's list of things she wanted to do before she was eighteen. We had a nice long conversation before we had to leave, discussing our various travel routes and her daughter's age-centered bucket list.
As we drove away a woman approached us, "Hey!! I just read about you!" She was from Chicago on a road trip of her own in her Corvette. She had been reading the paper while visiting her brother in Bonner's Ferry.
Views: Center of the Nation Monument by Ron Hall
For the rest of the afternoon we drove along 212, a remote road stretching from southeast Montana, cutting though a corner of northeast Wyoming, to Belle Fouche, South Dakota. There we stopped to see the Center of the Nation Monument.
Returning to the subject of heat on the road, we set off to find dinner in Spearfish, SD (ended up having an excellent Mexican dinner at Guadalajara). Before too long, we passed a water park. A large, slide-covered, water-spraying, water park. Instantly, my mother decided we had to go there. She called it a shangri-la. She whined for it as we passed by. I added the word "childish" to my screenplay description of her.
~ S.H.