The trip continues

Here's how our trip through the US looks like so far, starting from Chicago:

The above shows checkin points from Google Latitude. You may be wondering why there's so many of them throughout Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota, but very few in South Dakota and Wyoming.

We've been using a T-Mobile cell phone data plan while in the US, and it turns out they have basically no coverage at all in South Dakota and Wyoming - the only checkins we've done in those states were on wifi. That's also why we haven't done more updates of the blog, since we weren't able to do it from the road.

Anyway...

Monday morning we went to see Mount Rushmore. It was a blast - we went on a short hike around the site and got some really nice close up views of the mountain and generally had a lot of fun. Rather than posting a photo of the actual monuments, which everyone has seen before, here's one showing what the original plans called for:

Afterwards, we continued on, driving through Wyoming towards Yellowstone. We decided to not camp at Yellowstone due to the impending cold weather front, so our destination was the town of Cody, just short of the national park.

On the way, we decided to take the scenic route 16, instead of the I-90. It turned out to be more scenic than we had expected. We drove through many forested hills, seeing deer and beautiful sights and then passing through Tensleep Canyon, which was a very breathtaking view. Here's just one shot of the magnificent canyon:

Later we got a great view of the sunset and made our way to Cody WY, where we were a bit over-eager in finding a motel, choosing one offering "reasonable rates" when there were others just steps away offering "great rates" and many extra services, like breakfast included.

We ended the night by going to Granny's Restaurant for a late supper and cracking each other up discussing scenarios involving stocking up on fireworks from the nearby fireworks depot - the largest in the West!