OK. I haven’t done a good long drive in a while. I’m still coming down off some sort of legally acquired high because of this last one. See the previous post for the stats.

If you want more details click to see below the fold.

So, my buddy Josh and I are on a trip to hang out with the owner of KT Ordnance and whoever else ends up showing up. I have no idea who will be there.

That and I really thought it would be a good reason for me to take some vacation time and finally see some of the western US. Plus, Josh loves this area. Aside from Arizona (flew there) I haven’t really seen anything.

For various dull reasons I didn’t get around to picking up Josh until the early afternoon and we got everything sorted, loaded up, and were on the road around 3:00pm on I-196 in Grand Rapids Michigan.

Summary:
I-196 to I-94 to I-80 to I-35 (Des Moines, Iowa) north to I-90 again and took that all the way to Billings, Montana heading straight across South Dakota (1 hour nap there), into Wyoming, and finally north into Montana, then west to Billings.

I’ve done the route to Iowa before, and that’s all pretty boring stuff. It doesn’t matter where you’re from, unless perhaps it is the inner city, that flat open fields of Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa don’t bring much to the table.

I took a 1 hour nap a couple hundred miles into South Dakota. I heed the advice of my father, once a truck driver: A good nap is better than strong coffee.

South Dakota is pretty boring. I knew that already, having briefly been into the state before, but driving across the whole thing is a nightmare. It’s about 420 miles wide. The speed-limit there (thankfully) is 75mph. After construction it took 7 hours of driving in a mostly straight line plus the 1 hour nap to get across it.

The construction started to piss me off. Slowing down from 75 to 65 to 45 to pass over an overpass that’s under construction only to accelerate to 75 and do it all over again a few miles later. I would have ignored the signs but the actual blockades put up to narrow things down to one lane of traffic on the overpasses really meant you had to go 45mph to do it safely.

Why can’t they gang up to fix one REALLY fast and then move onto the next one? Why shutdown 20 of them in a row to be slowly worked on?

I’m starting to think that all construction planners should be required to try and drive across the US, or at least their own state, during construction season so that they see how stupid this stuff appears. There might very well be a good reason for this system, but it might do us all a bit of good if we could look at the problem again.

I got a glimpse at the Badlands in South Dakota. Interesting. I’d like to know more about why they exist so I’ll look that up tonight. We’ll take the scenic route back, I think, so that I can get a better look at them. Josh has already been through them at least once. Quite pretty.

We saw plenty of signs for tourist-trap like stuff too in South Dakota. A gator park? You really think people traveling in South Dakota have “gators” on their mind? I know why it exists — it’s just some guy with his own personal liking for gators trying to make a buck of letting people look at his pets, but it’s a bit out of place.

The other fucks were the people plastering the name “Wall Drug” all over the place. Apparently they had everything but no coherent message. I began pondering just what in the heck they were selling to the point that it pissed me off. I wasn’t going to stop, but, shit, it made me curious! Josh also noticed that they only had signs facing our side of the highway which had me thinking along the lines of “ignorant yahoos trying to make a quick buck with some junk shop.” One of the last signs I saw while heading west (and the direction we were heading is key to what Josh noted) said to look them up online.

Folks, we’re talking about 12 hours later through some shit we’ll get to in a bit and I was STILL pissed at this people. What’s your game? What’s your angle?

So I look them up online. An avalanche commences in my brain. The website is an online store. They sell western styled gear. Cowboy stuff. You know, the kind of thing that a guy that’s going from the east side of the US to the west side might be interested in. The exact kind of stuff that two guys that love guns (us) that are prone to getting active into Cowboy Action Shooting (us) would like to purchase online (us).

They probably get stragglers wondering “what the?” walking in that are prone to buying a pair of boots and such, but they might be onto a really cheap billboard campaign that plays on stereotypical demographics with relation to typical migration of folks that share an interest in the goods that they sell.

Twelve hours ago I didn’t like this business. Now? Hell I might shop there. Smart folk.

By now we’re in Wyoming. My biggest issue back in South Dakota was the plastering of signs. It kept me reading and kept my mind off the real issues, that being what do I do if it things go wrong.

When we get to Wyoming I get worried. Lakes? Ponds? Rivers? Where did they go!?

Michigan boys don’t like not being around water. It isn’t that we like to swim — we just like to drink water! It is kind of essential to living.

This one is a new challenge — and I have no answer aside from the bottled water in the back of the truck. I’ve got no answer. I couldn’t even tell you where to find a river -IF- you had a filter kit with you. In Michigan? Uhm, walk somewhere. Anywhere. You’re an idiot if you can’t find water in Michigan within 20 minutes.

In Wyoming? Fuck, 20 minutes would make you my saviour! You need MAPS to find water around that place! That SCARES me. Water doesn’t grow on trees, but trees grow on water and we got a LOT of trees in Michigan.

Wyoming? Lots of rocks and sand. Not my happy place.

We’ll see how well I deal with Montana. So far it looks better, but it still scares me. Not enough water.

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