Big Sky

Belle Fourche, SD—>Butte, MT

So Tom and I woke up in our stinky hotel room in Belle Fourche around 7:30 am. Did we mention that our room smelled like old, stale cigarettes and oily fish. Yuck! Other than that the room was decent. It was really hard to find a hotel in the area of South Dakota we were in because there is a HUGE bike rally in Sturgis, South Dakota right now. I've never seen so many bikers, it was nuts! The hotel had no coffee or breakfast so Tom and I just had a quick snakc of zucchini bread that Charlie had given us. Then we got back on the road. We took Rt. 212 through the rest of South Dakota, a tiny bit of Wyoming, and some Montana before Rt. 212 turned into I-90 through Montana. On Rt. 212 we stopped for some brunch at Cashway Diner in Broadus, MT. It was a tiny little hole in the wall place. The drive was pretty decent today. Not much traffic and the speed limit is 70/75 mph out here. The scenery was really nice. I've never seen so much open space! There was nothing but crops, cattle, and horses. At one place a horse had gotten outside the fence and was grazing close to the road. There are some pretty cool houses out here too. Cabin-like ones with lots of windows, big ol' farmhouses, and, for some reason, a lot of little houses that were painted blue.

The weather is really dry out here. My skin and lips are so dried out along with my eyes.

Once we got closer to Butte there were a lot of interesting features to the landscape. There are these random outcroppings of land everywhere a lot like the things we saw in the Badlands but just more random. It still wigs me out a little about how many huge hills and mountains there are.

We finally made it to Butte around 5:30pm. We had a good laugh when we got off the exit and 4 20-somethings were trying to hitch a ride west with signs that read “WE R NOT HIPPIES”.

The hotel we're in now is pretty nice. No breakfast here but very clean and not stinky.

We ventured into town to find dinner and stopped at Fred's Mesquite Grill. We both got sandwiches and they were really good! The town is pretty cool. It's not very touristy or anything spectacular but they have a lot of little shops and restaurants. The only other thing we did was stop at Safeway to get some toiletries because the hotel stuff is too rough.

We're planning on going to Spokane tomorrow but we may go the whole way to Seattle. We'll be going through Idaho and will probably stop in Couer d'Alene because it's supposed to be beautiful.