Vacation in the northern states

So we had a couple of airline trips coming on Southwest because of their Rapid Rewards program.

And we have this companion pass thing. And a reward weekend from the Avis people.

And we saw this opportunity to get four more states for our geocaching collection. Put it all together, and we found ourselves in Buffalo Wyoming, at the Occidental Hotel, built in 1880,

with one haunted room that you can't actually stay in because it's the library now.

 See the cool dinosaur skull? I think that may be the ghost.

We ate dinner in a private dining room - OK, maybe semi-private, but that's private - and I had a bison steak. Here's the view:

 It gets better. We stayed on a Thursday night, which happens to be when the musicians meet in the saloon to play blue grass music for a few hours:

See the cool old guy in the middle of the photo? He can play just about any instrument, and play it well. I could have bellied up to the bar except it was crowded, so I saved that for the next day:

Next we made a run to Montana, and got few caches in that state, then hopped over to North Dakota.

There we did some more caching, including some rarely traveled dirt roads. But those caches count, and we had North Dakota. But the real fun was in South Dakota. I really wanted to go there because in Rapid City, where I lived as a mere child a half century ago, there is this magical place called Dinosaur Park. I loved that place, and I wanted to see it again, and incidentally pick up a cache in the shadow of the largest dinosaur.

OK, maybe not in the shadow of it, but within a short stroll. My GPSer was leading me all over the place, since I hadn't bothered to calibrate it after changing batteries, so GA sat on a rock until I could stumble upon GZ (ground zero). While I kept stumbling around, trying not to fall off the cliff, she realized she was sitting within arm's reach of the cache, and logged the find. Brothers.
On the way out, I said goodbye to my favorite dinosaur, the duck bill, which was first found in South Dakota.

From there we went to another site I remembered as a child, the Bad Lands. Here, the erosion has carved fantastic shapes and exposed lots of dino fossils. And of course there are some Earth Caches.

No trip to South Dakota would be complete without a visit to Mt. Rushmore... especially on the weekend of the 4th of  July. We were there for a special ceremony, with an F-15 flying over the faces at 9:11 to thumb our noses at the pigs who brought the towers down.