Mary’s Travel Blog

We crossed into Iowa quite soon after we left this morning.

One thing we noticed yesterday and today was the great number of windmills across the landscape. The sad thing is that we saw thousands of windmills throughout Minnesota and Iowa that were completely still.

The landscape was quite consistent for most of the day …

At one point we say two crop dusting planes at once flying over the farmland …

We tried to find a spot for a morning break but when we finally found the first rest area after about 3 hours of driving it was on the other side of the construction zone we were driving through and also under construction, so no stop for the weary driver.

We stopped for lunch about 1:15 in Davenport at the Machine Shed Restaurant. We had been there before in May, 2025 and enjoyed it then, so decided to make a return visit. It has a fun farm theme.

We arrived at our campsite at Fishermans Corner on the East side of the Mississippi River soon after and set up. The temperature was above 90 so we turned on the air and stayed inside for awhile. We have camped here before in May. The river looks quite different in August.

We watched the sunset across the Mississippi River tonight. I think this is a fitting end for this blog.

Unless something unusual happens on our last leg of the trip to home tomorrow, this will be my last post. We expect to be home tomorrow mid-afternoon.

I am so grateful for the many prayers that have followed us these last few weeks. I am most grateful for the protection of our wonderful, loving Father God. We have seen much of His awesome Creation and I praise Him for His awesome greatness!!

We stopped at a couple of turnouts on our way out of the Badlands Scenic Drive this morning before returning to I-90.

The rest of the day was spent driving I-90 for over 400 miles. Along the way we crossed the Missouri River at Chamberlain, SD and we are now on Central Time.

Large farms and hillsides dotted with cattle were common sites

The landscape became greener and we started to see corn fields.

There were a few unusual sites that I captured out the window …

Tonight we are “camping” again at a hotel in Albert Lea, Minnesota. Jim says we have found “where the trucks sleep at night” (next to our hotel).

We didn’t have as many miles to cover today so we were able to stay at our campsite in Buffalo, WY longer this morning. This gave us the opportunity to watch our church service back home streaming on the web. A wonderful blessing!

We got on I-90 East and drove that most of the day. Here are a few out the window shots of scenery along the way …

We stopped at a nice rest stop for lunch. We noticed a herd of cows just behind the rest area in a fenced off field. One of the cows had found a way around the fence, though and was wandering through the picnic area. Not something I have ever seen at a rest area in Michigan!

We crossed the border into South Dakota and made a stop in Rapid City for fuel (finally below $4/gal because we found a Sams Club) and ice cream at the Culvers next to it.

About 45 minutes later we turned off at Wall, SD and began driving the Badlands Scenic Loop. We stopped at many turn offs and took lots of great photos.

We arrived at our campsite in the Cedar Pass Campground within the Badlands NP around 6:00. It didn’t take long to set up since it was a very basic site (but with electric!). No sooner had we gotten situated when the wind picked to about 20 mph with about 35 mph gusts. Jim helped out a lady across from us who was setting up a small tent and really struggling with it in the strong winds.

The sunset was gorgeous and about an hour after sunset the winds finally settled down.

We left Yellowstone NP this morning and started heading east.

It takes quite awhile to drive out the east entrance but the scenery is beautiful along the way.

We drove to just west of Cody, Wyoming and stopped to see the Buffalo Bill Dam. It was the tallest dam in the world when it opened in 1910 (325 ft.) We drove by the reservoir on the way.

We missed our turn in to the Visitor Center so we enjoyed three trips through this tunnel 🙂

Driving for the next hour or so was pretty easy but then we had to cross the Big Horn Mountains which was much more challenging (and this was the “easy” route I investigated for an RV pulling a car). Road construction also made those miles even more difficult but once again the scenery was beautiful.

We are camping tonight in a nice private park in Buffalo, WY. We are excited about full hookups after five nights of rustic camping in Yellowstone!!

We awoke to a steady rain this morning which was predicted to last most of the day. I wasn’t expecting to have many photos to share today, however the day turned out quite nice in spite of the rain.

We drove 17 miles south to the “Lake” area of the park to see what was available there. On the way we saw many bison again.

At one point one of them crossed the road not far in front of us but we could not get a shot of that one. Just a bit farther up I was able to get a shot out the window of several that were very close to us.

We went to the historic Lake Lodge first and had a cup of coffee in the lobby.

We decided to come back to have lunch there because they had a very nice cafeteria.

We drove to the Lake Village and stopped at the General Store but there wasn’t much else there. Then we stopped in to the Lake Hotel. This is also a historic place but in a much different style.

Both the Lodge and the Hotel were right along the northern edge of Yellowstone Lake.

It was almost lunch time by then so we drove back over to the Lodge and had a nice lunch there. We could get on their WiFi so that helped with checking on the weather for the next few days in the different locations we will be in then.

As we were leaving there we saw many cars/people along the road so we slowed down and then found a place to park. What they were looking at was a group of elks. We were excited to see that because we had only seen one elk so far.

On the way back we made another stop that gave us beautiful views of the Yellowstone River including some geysers and more bison across the river.

The rest of the afternoon we spent some time back at the campsite doing some necessary cleaning and then drove over to Canyon Village one last time and walked through the Visitor Center displays.

We leave here tomorrow morning and then start driving East.

We got up early this morning and drove back to the Midway Geyser Basin (the area that we could not get into yesterday). We saw the Grand Prismatic Spring and many other very colorful geysers in that area.

We then headed up to Norris Geyser Basin, hoping we were early enough to find parking there. We were! We first walked the boardwalk around the Porcelain Basin.

After that we went back to the car and took a break because we needed to return sweatshirts and get more water for the rest of the hike.

Then we walked the Back Basin which was a much larger area.

This pool looked like it would make a good hot tub if we could just add some bubbles and turn down the heat a bit …

One of the most famous geysers at Norris is the Steamboat Geyser which was erupting just a bit as we came by …

After leaving Norris, we found a nice picnic area along the Firehole River for our lunch stop. We continued back south a bit more to an area we had passed several times when we didn’t have time to stop. This time we could stop and see Gibbon Falls.

Then we headed back toward the Canyon Campground with a detour to take the Virginia Cascades drive along the way.

We took some time back at the campground to charge some batteries before heading to Canyon Village for an ice cream break and an opportunity to get on WiFi. One of things we wanted to use WiFi for was to get a weather report for Friday. Since it looks like we will have some rain tomorrow we drove over to see the Upper Falls on the Yellowstone River that we had missed on Tuesday.

Jim would still like to get back to one spot on the South Rim and replace some video that got deleted by mistake, but we will have to see if the weather cooperates.

We drove to the town of West Yellowstone this morning with a couple of purposes in mind. First, our camera memory card reader broke so we could not transfer images from Jim’s camera to my laptop. That meant once the memory card was full he couldn’t take any more photos and that situation was fast approaching. We tried to buy a new card reader but unfortunately the Yellowstone Camera Store was out of them. There are a couple of other ways to transfer the images but neither was working. First we stopped to McDonalds to have a spot to have a good internet connection and I downloaded the latest version of the Canon software meant for that purpose to see if that would help. In the meantime Jim was searching online for some help and came across a suggestion to try Apple Image Capture. We tried that and used a USB cable and it worked!! Whew!!

Our second purpose for visiting West Yellowstone was to visit the Yellowstone Historic Center Museum which is located in the original Union Pacific station. Not a large museum but lots of interesting information about early development of Yellowstone.

It was the only place we have seen a bear in Yellowstone so I decided to get a photo with the bear.

Then we headed back into the park. Our intention was to stop at a picnic area on the way for lunch but we ended up in a long traffic backup so we ate in the car as to save time and have something to do while in stopped traffic.

Once traffic was moving again (most likely the cause was animal gawkers who stop in the middle of the road). We wanted to stop at the Midway Geyser Basin and see the Grand Prismatic Spring but there was no parking available so we will come back for that (hopefully early in the morning tomorrow).

We spent the afternoon at the Old Faithful area. We saw Old Faithful erupt about an hour after we arrived and Jim was able to get some great video. We were also joined in our Old Faithful viewing by another bison.

We walked around the area and visited some of the inns/lodges. We really enjoy checking out the unique and beautiful architecture of those structures.

It was getting quite warm so we decided to put off walking around the upper geyser basin for a couple of hours and had an early supper in the meantime at the Old Faithful Lodge cafeteria. We were able to see Old Faithful erupt once more from the view out the windows of the cafeteria.

By then the temperatures had dropped and we had a very nice hike around many of the thermal features in the area.

This morning we drove to see the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River. We took the South Rim drive first. We had not seen the south rim viewpoints on previous trips so we were seeing new views of the Lower Falls.

The South Rim drive was a one way loop that brought us back to Canyon Village so we stopped in for a coffee break there.

Then we took the North Rim drive and took many additional photos of the beautiful Lower Falls.

The sky was clouding over so we decided to save the Upper Falls views for another day.

After stopping back to the camper for lunch we drove the Canyon to Tower road. There were many turn outs that featured beautiful panoramas. We were still following much of the Yellowstone River. One of the stops was called Calcite Springs, named for the milky-white calcite crystals that cover the area.

Once we reached what is called the Tower-Roosevelt area of the park, we also stopped in to visit the Roosevelt Lodge (and an ice cream break, of course :). The Lodge was built in 1906 to honor a trip that President Theodore Roosevelt made to the area. We had never seen the Lodge before so that was another first for us today.

From there we drove along the North Entrance Road to Lamar Valley. The valley is known to be home to many of the Yellowstone Bison herds. We were not disappointed with our quest to see some bison. We saw hundreds of bison!

After breakfast at the hotel we headed to the Harbor Freight store in Bozeman to pick up a battery analyzer. We just were not getting the performance out of the camper batteries that we should have so Jim wanted to check it out. [Kind of important to have good batteries going into five days of camping without electricity]. The battery tester showed the suspect battery was “no good” so off to Walmart just a couple of miles away to buy a new one.

We drove just over an hour to the town of Gardiner. Along the way we stopped to a beautiful rest area along a river and sat on stones along the bank for our morning break.

Gardiner is the northern entrance to Yellowstone. We stopped there to take a few photos of the historic arch marking the entrance to the park.

This view was just south of Gardiner …

We continued on to Mammoth Hot Springs. We ate lunch at a grille there and discovered that we could get on wifi while we were there. That seems to be true of the restaurants throughout the park so that should help me with posting on this blog this week 🙂

We hiked (more like climbed) the board walks to see the thermal features which are very interesting and beautiful as well.

We also saw an elk at one point very near the trail.

Next we drove to the Canyon Campground and got set up for the week. Jim managed to get us squeezed onto the very tight site but it took some doing!

We checked out the Canyon Village area near the campground. As we peeked in a couple restaurants and stores in the area Jim realized that he remembered them from when he was a kid and visited Yellowstone with his family. The park has maintained the 60’s retro theme so it looked pretty much the same.

We left Glacier NP early this morning and drove most of the way to our next destination: Yellowstone National Park.

Just south of Kalispell we drove for many miles along Flathead Lake which is the largest natural freshwater lake by surface area in the western U.S. outside Alaska.

We found a nice picnic area for morning coffee break and a nice rest stop for lunch.

The countryside was beautiful all along the way.

I planned a “camping” night in between Glacier and Yellowstone at a Comfort Suites in Bozeman to give us a break from rustic camping.

As we approached Bozeman the skies were very dark and there were Severe Thunderstorm Warnings out but we were able to arrive at the hotel with just a bit of rain and a few rumbles of thunder – very thankful for that!