The Munchkin's Notebook

We are home and the trip is over, now for a little trip wrap up.    We drove a total of 5,290.3 miles, bought 165 gallons of gas at an average price of $3.03 per gallon, and had an average fuel economy of 32.5 mpg.  We crossed and/or visited 15 states and spent an average of 7  hours a day driving.  This makes for a very long trip.   I took around 900 photos between my DSLR and cell phone but got it down to 365 final photos which include a few panorama and HDR photos.  You can see the pictures from the trip here “ Road Trip to Glacier NP ” I would say heading out is better than heading back, because you are excited to get to the destination and things are new and exciting.  However on the way back, you just want to get home. I don’t think it helped that on the way back we stopped at places I have visited before in better conditions, so they weren’t exciting to me.  I have also discovered I’m really not a road tripper, I hate being in a car fo...

Today included about 8 hours of driving to cross Illinois, Indiana, and a good part of Ohio.  We left the hotel around 6:45AM and got to our location for the night by 7:00PM, which included a stop to pick-up the doggie.  The drive was mostly uneventful except for the messy 4-5 lanes of  traffic around Chicago on I-80.  Then we hit a ton of construction going through Indiana and a bit through Ohio.  But other than that it was a rather unexciting drive.  We stopped at my mom’s house to pick up my dog, Teddy.  He was very happy to see us and was very bouncy.  Now he is going to sleep for a week  to recover from spending two weeks playing with my mom’s dog.    Tomorrow we did the 6-hour drive back to Sterling, VA to conclude our vacation and road trip.  So far we have driven 4,920 miles and will be around 5,300 by the time we get home.   I’ll do a complete trip wrap up in a couple days.   

Today was a lot of driving, about 7 hours worth.  We left the hotel around 7:00AM. Our first stop was the Iowa visitor center, which is an actual exit off the freeway and  right on the border of Nebraska. While the restroom portion of the area was open the actual visitor center, a riverboat, didn’t open till 10:00AM.  That seems rather late for a visitor center, since we arrived at about 8:30AM we weren’t going to wait around for it to open.  We then crossed the border into Nebraska briefly before heading back into Iowa. I would say the area is a bit like the Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania border area where you can transition to any of the three states rather easily by just changing direction slightly.  Our drive along US 20 in Iowa was straight, long, and very boring, and it had no rest areas.  We stopped in a small one light town for lunch at a Subway, that was about the most excitement we had.   Tomorrow is another long drive to Ohio to pick up m...

Today we left the hotel around 7:00AM to head to Wall Drug for breakfast.  Their breakfast was pretty good and reasonably priced for a tourist area.  We lucked out and were standing by the correct door when they opened for breakfast so we were at the beginning of the line, and beat all the bus tours in. After breakfast we walked around Wall Drug briefly before heading to Badlands National Park.  We stopped at the sign to get some pictures of the sign and the buffalo that like to hang out there.  Jim yelled at a stupid tourist who was going to attempt to cross the road and pet a buffalo.  The person slinked back to their car and gave us dirty looks as we drove by them. We were only looking out for the person’s safety and plus we didn’t want to be witnesses for an accident report.  We also informed the park ranger at the gate what happened so I think that car was going to get a talking to when it went through the gate.   Our first stop in the park was Pi...

Today we started our drive to Box Elder, SD around 7:30AM after having breakfast at Denny’s.  The drive was only supposed to be about 5.5 hours if we followed I-90,  so we were able to make a few stops along the way.  The first stop was at Little Bighorn National Battlefield National Monument .  I was not expecting much based on the battlefields around Virginia, but this one was rather interesting. I just wish it was cooler than the upper 90’s when we visited so we could have walked around some more and seen more of the battlefield markers.   The monument area shows both sides in a respectful manner.  The one thing I was surprised about is that there is a National Cemetery there that has veterans from the Indian Wars all the way through to the Korean War buried there.  I would recommend a visit if you are driving along I-90 in Montana.    The darkened stone is Custer's This is the side dedicated the the Native American Tribes From there ...

On road to Many Glacier This is a double day because day 7 was really long and day 8 was all driving.    On Day 7 we decided to drive to the east side of the park, specifically the Many Glacier area, since the Going-to-the-Sun road was still not open, we had to take the long way around which takes about 2 hours.  Note about 30 minutes of that two hours is going only 25 MPH or less on the dirt/gravel road into Many Glacier.   I highly recommend not taking the primary Google suggested route and use the route of US-2 to State- 49 (closed in the winter) to US-89 because the views along 49 are outstanding, even if the road has no guard rails with some steep drop offs.   We left a little after 7:00AM, the goal was no later than 7:30AM because it would take  2 hours to get there, which would get us there by 9:30AM and give us time to hike and do a few other things.  I realized if we got there about 9:30AM, and did the Grinnell Lake  trail we would g...

Today was a very rainy day, with it raining off and on till about 2:00PM, so I didn’t get a sunrise photo this morning.  Instead we slept till about 6:15AM and got breakfast at 7:30AM and then drove up to Polebridge.   People drive up to Polebridge, which is about 35 miles from the Canadian border,  to get fresh baked goods.  We got a large huckleberry bear claw and a spinach pastry roll. Was it worth it to drive 15 miles on an unpaved, potholed, dirt road in the rain, in my opinion no. The bear claw was good, I haven’t eaten the spinach roll yet,  but not driving down a dirt road to some one building town, good.   After that little adventure we drove over to the Fish Creek area to hike the Rocky Point trail.  I wanted to hike this trail to see if it would be a good place to take a sunrise photo over Lake McDonald.  Sadly the point was facing the wrong direction for it to work well.   The best location will be from the boat launch in Apgar....

Lake McDonald Today we discovered that the hotel does not have breakfast,  and the most useful breakfast place opens at 7:30AM. I personally would have liked to have been out already heading to the park at 7:30AM or in the park, since parking spots at popular trail heads fill up quickly.   We had breakfast at Glacier Highland Cafe, which was ok, and reasonably fast. From breakfast it was to the park, with the first stop being the visitor center.    For those that don’t know, Glacier NP went to a ticketing system for park entry, so unless you are staying at one of the lodges in the park you need a ticket, which is good for 7 days.  Tickets went on sale on May 28th;  we got ours that day and we were lucky to get one,  they sold out within an hour for all dates from June to September.   Entering the park was fairly easy, before the actual entrance they had three rangers/volunteers checking to make sure you had a valid entry ticket before you ev...

  Today started with an early morning trip to WalMart to pick up a flat of water and some juice to replenish our supply.  We will use refillable water bottles in the park; we didn’t use those on the drive because they don’t fit in any of the cup holders.  After our resupply stop at WalMart it was back on the road to the Belton Chalet , which is just outside of the west Glacier NP entrance.    The drive started out very clouded over and stayed that way for about 75-percent of the last 25-percent of the drive had rain.  We stopped twice on our 4 hour drive, once at a gas station about half way in and then again at Marias Pass which is a two-for-one stop because there is also a monument to Theadore Roosevelt as well as signs about the pass.  The monument, which is an obelisk, was constructed in 1931 in honor of the president who made forest conservation a national policy.  From there it was on to the hotel.   We arrived too early to ch...

Today was another long day, even though it was only a 7 hour drive.  We started the day at 0700 with breakfast at Taco John’s. I did not have a taco, I just ate the potatoes ole, which were basically tater tot crowns with some flavoring while Jim had the beef and potato burrito.  After breakfast we started the drive around 0730 to our first destination, the Painted Canyon Visitor Center of Theodore Rosevelt NP ,  which was about 30-minutes down the road. This area is basically the badlands of North Dakota, the less famous sibling of the Badlands NP in South Dakota.  We stopped here for about a half hour or so taking pictures and so I could get a stamp in my park passport. What is interesting about this first visitor center is it is also a rest stop, so it was easy for Jim to drive the CrossTrek around the parking lot to get a picture with the national park sign. From there we went down the road a little bit to the Theodore  Rosevelt NP Southern Unit Visito...

Today we started our journey at 0700 CST and arrived at our destination at about 1815 MNT, thus it was a long day.   The states are getting bigger now, we only covered about three states,  the rest of Wisconsin, all of Minnesota, and a good part of North Dakota.  While it was a long drive we didn’t do a whole lot.  We had a rest stop right before we got out of Wisconsin and a couple in Minnesota, those potty breaks are important.    Our longest rest stop for the day was in Fargo, North Dakota where we had lunch at the “Space Alien Grill and Bar” and stopped at the Fargo Visitor center.  The food was typical bar and grill fare, the only a-typical things on the menu were the super sized baked potato meals and the pickle fries. Our friend Christina got the half taco baked potato and salad combo while Jim got the pickle fries.  The pickle fries were a bit odd, while we have had fried pickles before but pickle spears were a bit strange, not really...

We started our journey out the last remaining bit of Ohio at a bright and early 0800, from there it was through Indiana and  Illinois, to our stopping point for the night in Wisconsin.   The journey through Indiana was a bit rainy and uneventful.  We also went through the time change from eastern to central time, which threw off our initial lunch plan, since when we planned to have lunch at 1100 EST became 1000 CST and places aren’t serving lunch then.  This resulted in us having a later lunch then usual due to having to make it through Chicago before finding a place to stop.  I must say that I was rather disappointed though with the crossing the border between Indiana and Illinois because there is no welcome to Illinois sign, it just welcomes you to Chicago.  The drive through Chicago was congested, construction filled, and all around big city driving.  Once we made it through the city,  we discovered Illinois doesn’t really like to identify...

  This year we are doing something a little different and road tripping about ¾ of the way across the country to Glacier National Park.  We decided on the road trip due to three things 1) the pandemic made getting flights and rental cars difficult since everyone is rebuilding capacity at this time, 2) our move from Ohio to Virginia made determine where to book flights out of difficult since timing of the move was in flux, and  3) we wanted Teddy (our dog) to be under as little stress as possible. So we wanted him to stay with family instead of a brand new pet sitter; we would have had to rush to find one.     These factors led us to just doing a road trip this year.     The first day of the trip I’m counting as “Day 0” because it is very similar to the first day of any of our air plane trips, by which I mean not very exciting.  We have done the drive from Virginia to Ohio several times so it is not new and different. The only difference ...

We recently moved from Dayton, OH to Sterling, VA for my job and it was not a fun move.  The first stressor was finding a home.  As most people trying to find a home right now are aware the market is extremely hot and it difficult to buy a “starter” house or just a house in general. Basically, the homes go up on Thursday or Friday and are gone by Monday while going for above asking price.  We also had the added complication of searching for a home virtually, because of the way the market is, a house hunting trip would have been pointless.    Thankfully we had a good agent through Redfin , who really helped us through the process and worked with our timeline and restrictions.  Also, Redfin made it easy for us to tour the homes virtually, which I think let us see more homes then if we had to drive to each one individually.   Additionally, the First Federal Bank we went with for the loan, was great to work with. The loan officer really detailed...