Good morning! Long drive yesterday, but we did revisit the Black Hills, which was nostalgic. After dinner at the Powder House in Keystone, we gave Deadwood another chance.

It’s still dead.

We didn’t go back to Mount Rushmore; the July 4th fireworks display was still on schedule, and we didn’t want to fight the crowds. Our very small room at the Big Sky Lodge was cozy, with a great view of Rapid City below.

I tried to get some photos of the several fireworks displays going on last night, but they didn’t come out. Too far away. But how impressive — we’d never seen anything like it. There must have been five different fireworks shows going on at once, down in Rapid City. Nice to be in a lodge on a hill.

Today is another grueling drive, all the way to Iowa. Hopefully we’ll be able to have some relaxation time. This is Day 25 of our Odyssey, and the travelers are starting to show juuuuust a bit of wear and tear, haha. Still, we’re delighted and blessed to have the chance to do this. Not complaining.

OK, 7 a.m. and time to get this carnival packed up and on the road. If nothing else, we’re getting really good at it, and by the time we get back home, we’ll have it totally down to a science.

FO

Happy America Day, fiends! And, as was pointed out on Facebook by someone this morning — Happy Egypt Day, as their “independence day” is today as well.

The sun peeking through a stand of redwoods (northern California)

As I’ve been up since 4 (darn time change again), I took the opportunity to go through my phone to find some photos I may not have shown you yet. So I will yammer on relentlessly while throwing in a picture now and then, OK? OK.

We’re in Rock Springs, out-in-the-middle-of-nowhere-Wyoming right now. The town is just beginning to wake up. I’ve had some time to reflect on the last three weeks, and boy has it been wonderful. I’ve said before that this is probably the last Odyssey of this length, as our lives will change now that seminary is done and the job search will commence in six days.

View from the pier on Clear Lake, outside the Featherbed Railroad B & B (Nice, California)

Although he officially “retires” at the end of this month (his 62nd birthday), the Thriller is still on the market for his counseling gig. For that (and other) reasons, our summer getaways will be shorter from now on, which is fine. We’ll still make the best of them, and yes — Odyssey 2014 is already in the works.

This voyage has been about wide-open spaces, yes? We’ve seen a bunch of them, from the cattle ranches of the Dakotas to the endless expanses of Utah. What a thrill to see our country in this way. In fact, I highly recommend it, and will write about it, courtesy of several of you who have expressed your own interest in taking a Great American Road Trip. Stay tuned!

Find the Fink.

Speaking of Utah, I had a ball on the Bonneville Salt Flats yesterday morning. I ran out a couple hundred feet onto the hard, dry salt pan, turned and waved at the Thriller, and just about got blown over several times by huge gusts of wind. Talk about wide-open expanses of a totally different kind, wow.

Today, we revisit — if only briefly — some sights from the Western US Odyssey of 2011. As we head towards Lake Winnebago, Wisconsin to spend some time with the Thriller’s mom, we will cross paths with Keystone, South Dakota: home to Mt. Rushmore. It’ll be nice to see the old boys’ craggy faces again. We also plan to visit our favorite Black Hills restaurant, the Powder House Lodge, if we can. Best filet mignon I’ve ever had.

Until tomorrow then — off we go, off the interstate and into the hills. Yay! Have a relaxing and enjoyable holiday.

And it’s Wednesday already — six days till we see home! I’m excited.

What looks like a lake on the horizon is actually just salt pan: the remains of ancient Lake Bonneville.

OK, yesterday. Umm. Haha. West Wendover is a small (population 4500) town near the Utah border, which pretty much explains why it’s little more than a conglomeration of casinos. (Gambling is illegal in UT.)

Outside of fast food, gasoline and gambling, there’s not much there. The Bonneville Salt Flats are 5 miles to the east, so we’re hitting that this morning. I will try to keep the Thriller from racing across them to speed-test the Finkmobile.

So, with absolutely nothing else to see, we did a casino hop. It was surreal…the Thriller put it best:

It was like a scene out of Vegas Vacation, where Clark Griswold and his brother end up in a casino that had games no one ever heard of, and were impossible to win.

“Pick a number between one and ten.”

“Six.”

“Oops, wrong, it was two.”

Ha. You get the idea.

So I can’t say we’re sad to see West Wendover in the rear view. And we’re getting a bit antsy to get home, too. We have long drives ahead of us from here on out (6+ hours each). At least they’re long for us. Still, we hope to see some interesting things along the way.

As long as it’s not this.

TTFN! Ta ta for now!

We crossed the Nevada border yesterday on I-80 East, about 25 miles from Reno. It was a hot day out west, as most of you know, and the temperatures, according to the little gauge on the car clock, hovered between 100 and 103 degrees. Shoo-ee!

So there we were, motoring along, excited to get to one of our favorite cities to play. Chatting, laughing, then … uh-oh. All traffic came to a dead stop. At first, we joked about the dreaded “phantom bottleneck” (a term that, for years, I thought I authored; imagine my sad face when I learned I didn’t make up the phrase after all), but soon we were concerned that there might have been an accident. Well, there had been. I got on Twitter and learned that a truck had caught fire up ahead. An hour later, when we were allowed to pass the accident site in single file, it appeared that the fire department had it under control. I hope the driver wasn’t hurt.

After that, it was smooth sailing, and we arrived in “The Biggest Little City in the World.” We always stay at a Caesar’s property (Caesar’s Palace, Horseshoe, Bally’s, Harrah’s) because the Thriller is a member of their Players’ Club, so we get discounts. This time around, the discount was 100%. And a first for us: a corner suite!

It was a mini-suite, actually, but the view was nice, and for $0 and comp credits (including the awesome Harrah’s buffet), it was great.

They say a good day at the casino is when you leave with more — or the same number of — shekels than what you brought. Such was the case for us and our egg of money. Yay, viva la relaxación! We loved it.

We’re still in Nevada tonight, staying at the Peppermill in Wendover. Never been there; should be fun as well, as we continue to make our way back home. *XOXO*

Happy Tunesday, luvs!

What a fun stop for us, after a long, long, long day of driving through the redwood trees. (Are we bad people if we said that we were ready to leave the forests?)

Last night, we stayed at the Featherbed Railroad Bed & Breakfast in Nice, California. We were delighted from the minute we drove in the driveway and saw about eight cabooses — real ones — on the property by the lake. Each of the train cars have names that go with their particular themes of decor; ours was the “Wild, Wild West.” Hilarious! It was fantastic.

Purchased when the caboose cars were retired from service by the railroads, the owners refurbished each one into a unique little world. Our car, with the Old West theme, had antique furniture, a bar with a mirror, a brass headboard on the bed, old fashioned wallpaper, a toilet with a chain flush handle, and a cool little upper compartment that you could actually sit in.

You can click through the photos (clicking on a shadowboxed picture loads the next one) and see for yourself. Awesome place!

Exterior ~ View from Bathroom ~ The Bar ~ The Crow’s Nest ~ View from Door ~ Clawfoot Tub ~ Sink ~ Chain-flush Commode

There was a porcelain water pitcher inside a bowl on the antique dresser, and the bathroom even had a spittoon! So kitschy and fun. We enjoyed hanging out in it all evening. Truthfully, it was so hot (93 degrees at 7 p.m.), and the midges were so bad, we didn’t feel much like walking along the lakeshore, so we didn’t. We went out for salads, came back and stayed in, stayed cool, and enjoyed the personality of the place.

Today it’s off to Reno, and you know what that means — casino fun at Harrah’s. We will let fly with our little egg of gambling money, and hopefully it’ll last. On the road we go, and it’s important to note that this morning marks the beginning of the drive eastward; homeward. Yay!