Four State Day

Today we headed north out of Colorado on the first leg of our road trip. Our route will take us to the Black Hills of South Dakota, across Wyoming, into Montana and then to Yellowstone National Park for a week. Then we will head south-east to Steamboat Springs for a few days before returning to Denver for our flight home. When we came to hire our car I persuaded James to upgrade to an SUV; great excitement ensued because we got to choose between a Jeep and a Ford. Davie chose the Ford Escape because it has more leg room in the back, and so our road trip began. 

The journey from Denver to Wyoming was uneventful; the roads were quite busy, the landscape was flat and the light was quite hazy. After a couple of hours we stopped for a quick lunch at a MacDonald's (not my normal choice of dining experience) at a tiny and kind of scruffy town; the new manager was holding a get-to-know-you meeting with his staff at the table next to us and I could tell that he was onto a loser because several of the staff complained at having to come in for it on their day off, and one of them had brought her tiny children who were quite rightly kicking off. 

When we set off again we spontaneously decided to make a detour into Nebraska, on the grounds that it was only about thirty miles to the east and that it's unlikely that would ever visit it otherwise. So off we went, despite the anguished protests of the sat nav, and were soon excitedly posing for photos at the state line! This whim did add two hours of extra driving onto our day, but it was really interesting to see west Nebraska which had beautiful rock formations called buttes, and we also visited Fort Robinson. This was a little fort dating back to the rather sad and fruitless attempts by the Sioux Indians to retain their land in the 1870s. Crazy Horse was killed there in 1877 while trying to escape arrest. Basically the settlers broke all their promises about land to the native Americans as soon as the gold rush started, and due to sheer numbers and weaponry the native Americans didn't stand a chance. I've got a feeling we're going to see a lot more examples of this over the next week.

Onwards and northwards to South Dakota, more posing for photos as we entered our fourth State of the day, and we arrived in the verdant and beautiful Black Hills. We saw deer and buffalo grazing right beside the road, and turkeys jumping around wild. And after nine hours (including stops) we have arrived in Custer where we will base ourselves for the next four days.