I-90
We had a little bit of everything on this day.
First there was the stark surrealness of Little Bighorn. Quite honestly, I don’t care that the edit feature on this computing device does not recognize “surrealness” as a word, because I control this blog, not the Ghost of Steve Jobs.
I found out that one can piggy back onto the wifi of a tour bus in the parking lot of national monuments. Up till now I thought the buses had no real function.
When one wanders for too long among the dead, one must pay the price of the rising mercury. It was 92 when we passed through Billings.
At Little Bighorn, I met a fellow who was driving up to Chicken, AK to work at a mine. He had a Toyota pickup with one of those little Scamp trailers behind it. He said he’d watch for me on the highway up, and that he’d stop if he saw me on the shoulder. Note: he didn’t say he’d help, just that he would stop. The conversation made me wish that the Rover was running a little better.
We experienced head winds between Billings and Bozeman that made me cuss & cringe. I saw a wild turkey cross I-90 that was felled by a gust and bounced several yards eastbound until it finally gained its footing and dignity. The poor bird had my sympathy, and I told the turkey so.
The NAPA electric fuel pump crapped out on me while climbing a steep incline. That was discouraging. It either died or could not pass through the vapor lock veil. I pulled off at the next exit & replaced it with the backup pump while parked in a field.
We hit a t-storm west of Bozeman that forced me to pull over because the wiper couldn’t keep up with the rain and hail. Hail makes a very unique sound on an aluminum roof, I must say.
Crossing the pass into Bozeman was torture. That’s all I’m going to say.
Finally, I exited on Hwy 2, which took us on a beautiful drive through a river valley to Lewis & Clark Caverns State Park. It turned out that the place was packed with kids on some sort of retreat, but I stopped anyway. For the most part they avoided me, but I did overhear the quote of the trip so far when a group of them walked to the shower house as I drank a scotch & read some Hunter S Thompson. One of the guys in the group said, “That guy is living the life… He has a fucking treehouse on his truck.”
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