Driving from Wyoming to Washington

Post Yellowstone, the original plan was to head up to Glacier National Park. Feeling the pressure of time and weather, we decided to head west instead after a little soul searching. We’d still love to see Glacier, but it deserves its own trip, plus we saw similar mountains relatively recently in South America.

Connecting the Dots

In order to give you a little insight into our trip, I’d like to describe how we’re finding our way across this great nation. We’re traveling with three navigation tools.

The first, and most reliable, is Mr. Geepes, the GPS. Geepes gets us everywhere we want to go and is a super useful tool. Getting from town to town? Check. Researching the distance between two (or fifteen) points? Check. Finding a hotel or the nearest Subway? Big check. I’m sure we’d do fine if all we has was Geepes, but he’s not our only source of info on this trip.

Our second guide is the USA Lonely Planet guidebook. It has turned out to be decently helpful in sparking ideas and getting general descriptions of areas, but not as helpful as we would have liked. The US is a pretty big place and several sectional guides would probably have been a more informative choice than the cover-it-all book.

Last, but definitely not least, is our Rand McNally atlas. Geepes does well with directions, but something about route planning with a paper map is much more satisfying. The atlas does have one other thing going for it: I think it’s been with the car for its whole life…it’s the 1996 edition. It contains gems such as vacation hot spots that include the Clinton’s favorite spots and the “recently popularized” bridges of Madison County.

Of course there are other things to help out (friends’ recommendations, that internet thingamajig), but these three are always in the car with us, helping us get from point A to B, and all those random stops in between.

Into Wyoming

Leaving Denver, we drove north into Wyoming. We didn’t take a main highway, but rather a smaller road going northwest towards Grand Teton National Park. Though the scenery was much more interesting than one can assume the main artery to be, there were two drawbacks to taking this road.

1)  No “Welcome to Wyoming” sign to add to our photo collection. This happened again coming in from the west a week later, so maybe Wyoming is balancing its budget by cutting highway signs.

2) Our car suffered an injury. Poor windshield!

I suppose neither was the route’s fault, really.  It was nice to get off the main highway and into the rural areas that actually look different from state to state, instead of the continuous billboards and gas stations.