The highlights of the last two days of my trip can be covered via a fairly brief summary, I think. I got up nice and early on Saturday morning, took down my campsite, loaded up the car, and was under way by 6:50 am. It took almost two hours to reach the northeast entrance, but I was out of the park by about 8:45, and heading up into Bear Tooth Pass very shortly thereafter. I did manage to stop at “the” scenic overlook spot this time (I hadn’t thought it was very missable, so I’d been astonished that I’d somehow missed it on the drive out—but it turns out that it’s even less missable going back the other way).
After the mountain pass, the day’s drive was relatively uneventful. I enjoyed some music and experienced some good thinkin’ time; on Highway 212 once I was through the pass and heading north toward the interstate, I had my window rolled down, music playing, and generally still felt like I was on vacation, so that was cool. I’ve actually forgotten, at this point, exactly what I did about lunch on this day; I believe I made a sandwich from my picnic supplies and probably just ate while driving, but the details are already a bit of blur. At any rate, I rolled into Theodore Roosevelt National Park just before 4:00 pm.
The down side of TR is that the campsites don’t have fire rings—just small raised charcoal grills. Not having any charcoal with me, this wasn’t very convenient, so I had decided that after setting up my tent, I would jump back on the interstate and continue onward to Dickinson (about 30 miles east), and find myself some dinner in town. I was maybe going to go to the same Bonanza that Jen and I have eaten at during multiple previous trips, but I found that it had gone out of business (!), so I settled for more of a fast food option. While there, I also tried to avail myself of the free wifi to download email onto my phone, but the place where I was eating was having trouble with their wifi or something. So, when I was finished, I walked across the street and stepped into the entryway of a McDonald’s to avail myself of their free wifi, whereupon I was able to reestablish contact with the outside world for the first time in a week.
Back at my campsite after my dinner excursion, I made the decision to leave the rainfly off the tent for this final night, since there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Also, it was quite warm (I wasn’t in the mountains anymore!), so I wanted to maximize ventilation. Well, predictably enough, I was awakened around 2:30 am by the sound of raindrops landing on the tent—so I scrambled out, grabbed the rainfly, and quickly deployed it as the rain was picking up. It all worked out pretty well, actually; it didn’t start raining hard until shortly after I got back in the tent, and nothing inside really got wet. Plus, in the early hours of the morning, the rain stopped and it got really, really windy for a while, and the wind blow-dried the tent itself pretty effectively. So I didn’t even have to pack up wet equipment when I got up!
I failed to keep track of what time I got under way on the final day of the trip, but it was nice and early again. I was conscious both of the fact that I would lose an hour today traveling back into the Central time zone, and of a detour/stop that I wanted to make along the way. Of course, there was in one sense less need to be concerned with getting to my destination at a reasonable hour today, since that destination was to be home (so no need to set up camp!). Still, I didn’t want to be rolling in really late. On the other hand, though, I did want to squeeze in one last bit of vacationy fun before coming back to reality—hence that detour/stop that I mentioned. Basically, I had decided to stop for a quick swim in the Missouri River, at a spot about twenty minutes south of Bismarck that I’d found via the interwebs during my pre-trip planning. The spot (Kimball Bottoms Recreation Area) proved to be pretty much in the middle of nowhere, but there were a few people there swimming, fishing, and otherwise recreating. I got there around 11:00 am (Central Time, now), which was a little ahead of the schedule that I’d set for myself (not a bad thing). The river was bracingly cold and felt great after sitting in the car all morning and the whole previous day (and not having showered or bathed since…well, since the Yellowstone and the Boiling River three days earlier). I didn’t stray very far from shore, because there was an extreme drop-off and a pretty serious current (and I also didn’t take any pictures)—but I did spend some time floating on my back and relaxing, enjoying the last few moments of pure vacation before the final leg of the journey home.
Most of that final leg was pretty uneventful, except for the !@#@$%!$!@! road construction on the interstate in the St. Cloud area once I was back in “good old” Minnesota. Traffic was alternately standing still or moving at a crawl for over an hour, which was no fun at all. I was so close to home, and very ready to be done driving, and for a long time there just seemed to be no end in sight to the traffic jam… Argh. Well, vacation was over, I guess. I don’t even recall what time it was when I finally rolled into the Cities; I stopped to grab some dinner before actually heading home, and ate it where I stopped rather than taking it to go, and by the time I did eventually pull into my own driveway, I want to say that it was around 7:30. Sigh. Trip over.