Day one // July 6, 2008 [link to photos]

Today is the first day of a long trip that will take us over 5100 miles out west and back, through South Dakota, Wyoming and Montana, then down through Victoria British Columbia, Washington and Oregon, and back home via Utah, Colorado, Nebraska and Iowa.

It wouldn’t be like a real vacation if it didn’t start out with a snaffoo. Just 5 miles in, Natalie realized that we didn’t bring our passports with us for the Canada leg of the journey through Victoria. Doh! So we raced back home to grab our passports with mine NO WHERE to be found. Thrashing through our tiny house like the fairy tale princess racing to find the peapod in the stack of mattresses, we tore through storage containers, bookshelves, closets, behind bookshelves, and rinse and repeated hoping for different results.

Nothing.

After having printed out instructions on what to do with a lost passport situation and not about ready to kiss $600 good bye for our package deal in Victoria [ferry, hotel, whale watching, and garden tour], we made a final resolve to check the storage facility. It was highly improbable that it would be there to begin with, but we decided to check.

Repeating the ravaging exercise to find my passport, we tore through stacks of storage bins scouring their contents for my little blue book. The VERY last bin in the very back, bottom contained my passport. And with a DEEP sigh of relief, we put everything back quickly and made our way on the road.

The drive to Rapid City was uneventful and relatively scenic, as far as desolate rolling hills can be. It was nice, but nothing that I’d put our trip on pause for. And after switching drivers five hours into the trip, Natalie took us into Rapid City at just around eight hours.

After getting checked in at the Days Inn, we had dinner at a place that intrigued us both, the Firehouse Brewing Company in downtown Rapid City. Rapid City reminded me a bit like a really large Hastings, Minnesota. On one end of town you had the charming, antique district with buildings that go back decades and have that “this town is so cute I could probably live here” kind of feel to it. And on the northeast end, the machine of “progress” was flourishing with a Home Depot, Applebees, Borders Bookstore, and other consumer-driven chain stores. But I’ll save my rant about mass-consumer stores in small-medium towns for another time.

Where was I. Oh yeah, we ate at the Firehouse Brewing Company, a brew pub that boasted about being the restaurant with the “unfair advantage” — boasting great food and being near Mount Rushmore and other area attractions. But for them to boast about great food would be misleading. Both Natalie and I ordered burgers of different varieties — Natalie the “brewmaster burger” and me the buffalo burger. Those had to be the DRYEST burgers we’ve ever had, and for the price that they were charging, they are getting the blog-slap. About the only thing that made my experience there marginally redemptive was the okay beer. I had their blonde and it was pretty good, but didn’t have enough CO2 in it to give it the zest that a good blonde beer needs. Instead it was relatively flat and lifeless.

Fortunately the server was accommodating and took one of the beers off our tab, sparing us of having to shell out nearly $10 for meat that probably spent the better portion of its time in a stainless steal warming container, where every ounce of juiciness evaporated away.

And did I mention that it took us nearly two hours in all to order, get our food, pay the bill, and make our way out? Our next visit to Rapid City will take us elsewhere and will probably save Firehouse for just the beer..

Later we visited Mount Rushmore and were fortunate to have a bit of a light show to go with the evening lighting of the immortalized US presidents — a thunderstorm rolled in overhead and offered some pretty unique photo opportunities with the lightning overhead. But the novelty soon wore off as the skies opened up and down came a torrential downpour of rain with occasional hail. It took nearly 45 minutes or so to get back, driving 40 miles per hour in extremely heavy downpours. But we made it back safe and are ready for a great night’s sleep and to make our way out to Jackson, Wyoming to the majestic Grand Tetons. I’m SO excited!

July 6, 2008, 7:25 pm

Filed under: General

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