Westward, Ho!
In the land of cowboys and cattle

Day 2
I last left you at the Comfort Inn in Buffalo, WY. On Sept. 29th, we slept in a bit and took off driving at 6am. We drove pretty much due north on I-90 into Montana, where we then went west for a bit before heading down (via I-15) through Idaho and into Utah. Today was another long drive, and we didn't even stop at any sites. I think we drove about 12 hours. We did get to drive through a tiny portion of Yellowstone, but just the far western edge.

Wyoming
The moon was still out as we left Wyoming, so I got a picture of that. We also had quite the dichotomous sky, so I took another picture of that. I thought they were pretty cool pictures.


Montana
We then entered Montana, which we drove in for quite a while. It was pretty boring, although there were patches of nice scenery. All the big cities along I-90 seemed to start with the letter B. Buffalo (WY), Billings (MT), Bozeman (MT), Butte (MT). Boise (ID), however, is not on I-90.

We ate at Arby's for lunch in Bozeman. That's pretty much all I can say about MT. Oh, the last part of MT and into the very start of Idaho is a part of Yellowstone National Park. That area was pretty, but we weren't in it too much. My "Welcome to Montana" sign turned out blurry. For shame. It's a pretty ugly sign, imo. I don't like what they've got going with that whole circle thing. It looks like it's trying to be the world or something. But it's not.


Idaho
No, you da ho! Man, I love that joke. The Idaho sign was pretty boring, but it had nice scenery in the background. As the sign informs, this part of Idaho forms part of the Continental Divide. The Continental Divide is the "line" that separates where water flows--into the Pacific or into the Atlantic. Everything west of the Divide flows in to the Pacific. Everything east flows in to the Atlantic. Amazing, eh? So, we drove through the bottom eastern part of Idaho. It pretty much sucked until the last 45 minutes or so. Now, I hear that parts of Idaho are very pretty, but not where we drove for most of the time. We drove just to the east of 'Craters of the Moon' National Park. Which sounds cool, but if the terrain we saw was anything to go by, it probably totally sucks. We drove through Ashton, ID which claims to be the world's largest seed potato growing area. I got a picture of a potato field. It doesn't look like much. I like corn fields better. As we neared Utah it got a bit more pretty.


Utah
We weren't in Utah that long today. Our original goal was to make it to Salt Lake City to stay the night there, but we crapped out about 45 minutes away and decided to stay the night at a Holiday Inn in Ogden, Utah. We ate at a little Italian restaurant in town. It was ok. They had awesome homemade french salad dressing. Talk about a crappy Utah welcome sign picture. Not only is it blurry, but it has a huge clump of bug guts right over where it says, "Utah." Eww. We didn't go skiing in Utah, but we did go to Arches National Park (one arch of which is featured on the sign) that I'll talk about much later on in our journey.