9/3 -- Drive Towards Chicago

It was supposed to rain today at Glacier, so we dumped any plans to do more hiking and headed out to breakfast at 7:30 am, same place as yesterday. We had had the mistaken idea that they were slow because they were barely open. Figured out today that they are just slow. Finally on the road at 8:30 with intermittent rain for the first hour or so.

There are several ways to get to I-90 and we took a scenic road, possibly one of the less obvious choices, but highly recommended by Beth and Norm. The very pleasant surprise was that the speed limit was 70 most of the time, there were few towns with lower limits and we were practically the only ones on the road.

Our next destination is Huntley, IL to visit Kristen' and her family as well as a jaunt to Madison to see niece Carla on Saturday or Sunday. We also wanted to go to Mt. Rushmore which is sort of on the way and which neither of us has seen for over 50 years. The total miles is 1500, which means 3 days, so we drove off without any real idea of how far we would get, but surely not all the way to Rushmore, which is about halfway to Huntley. Traffic continued to be light and we actually got all the way to Buffalo, Wyoming, where we are staying tonight.

Our cabin at the Z-Bar Motel in Buffalo, Wyoming

There appears to be a lot of open space in both Montana and Wyoming. Montana has fewer than a million residents in the 4th largest state by area, and Wyoming has fewer than 600,000 in the 9th largest state. This makes the 75 mph speed limits very useful -- hardly anyone to compete with! If I am over the limit, I try to be no more than the 3rd fastest car out there, but today, there were so few cars, we had no one to compare to.

We had a bit of a challenge going to dinner. We had picked a place based on the AAA tour book and online reviews, but the motel staff recommended another option, so we tried that. It was jammed to the gills with no place to park and a probable long wait for a table, so we went to our original option about a 1/4 mile away. It was closed for the week for vacation.  Next we went to our 3rd choice, a Mexican restaurant downtown, which is closed Wednesdays. Then there were reviews for both the Occidental Hotel and the Virginian -- we found both locations but the Virginian reviews were iffy, so we walked back to the hotel and discovered that their restaurant IS the Virginian, which you get to by walking thru several adjoining buildings. Dinner was VERY good, despite the messed-up reviews.