August 29-31 - The Drive Home

After over 9 weeks of living in the trailer and moving around every few days, we are both ready to head for home.  It's sad to leave the mountains behind, so we look back and take pics whenever we can.

We have a lot of miles of prairie ahead of us, all of Montana east of the Rockies.

Stopped in Browning for a fill up.  Nice teepee!

A few last looks at the mountains.

The seemingly endless prairie is pretty cool though.

Leaving the Blackfeet Country.

Prairie bikers!

Well, there's a lot to talk about in this pic......

Looks like a good spot for wind turbines!

Driving into one of the little towns along US 2.

Havre is actually one of the bigger towns we've seen in a while, well since Calgary anyway.

Just east of Havre, here's the train derailment we heard about on the radio.  Cause still under investigation.

Kinda like some mini Badlands here.

We saw a couple of these wind turbine convoys going the other way.  The blades for these things are huge!

So are the pedestals.

We spend the first night at a Flying J just east of the Montana/North Dakota line.  No sense in paying for a campground when all you're gonna do is go to sleep, wake up, and get on the road again.  We saw a lot of buffalo - herds of them, as we drove through the Theodore Roosevelt National Park and the National Grasslands.  The coffee hadn't kicked in yet though so the photographer missed the shots.

The second night, it was after midnight when we stopped at Black River Falls, WI and parked amongst a bunch of semis in the Perkins parking lot.  We were just waiting for them to open for breakfast.  When daylight came, there was no doubt we were in Wisconsin.

And we saw our first big orange Wisconsin moose too.

After getting through Chicago and Gary, which was about as much fun as we imagined it would be, the end of our trip is in sight.

We rolled into the driveway just before dark on Wednesday, the last day of August, 2011.  We were happy to see Theresa and Jazzy the cat waiting for us.

Here's a map that shows where we traveled.  In 9 weeks and 4 days, we pulled the fifth wheel over 10,000 miles, drove the truck about 13,000 miles, and put about another 2,000 miles on the motorcycle.

One thing is for sure, it's a long way to Alaska.  It's about the same distance to drive to Bogata, Columbia.  We'll pass on that trip though.


We will miss the long daylight hours we had in Alaska, but it won't be long and they will miss them there too.