Baby, You're a Firework

Igniting the light and letting it shine.

Happy Birthday, America!

Today we celebrate America's 238th. Here are a few iconic American spots I've had the pleasure seeing.

San Francisco. Of course!

Yosemite.

Disneyland.

Seattle.

Grand Canyon.

Sedona.

Yellowstone.

Mount Rushmore.

St. Louis.

Chicago.

Boston.

Washington DC.

New York City.

And one more, coming back home to San Francisco.

America. The Beautiful.

Badlands National Park

I thought I was done reminiscing about our road trip, but here's one more video.

Ice Jam against Fishing Bridge in Yellowstone

For us California peeps, this was one of the cooler things we saw on our trip.

The Yellowstone Lake was still covered with ice.

It flows into to Yellowstone River but there's a bridge, called Fishing Bridge, at the mouth of the river.

The pylons of the bridge kept the ice from flowing through smoothly, creating an ice jam. I've done a bit of internet searching since then and it's not uncommon in areas that get really really cold.

But California people don't see things like this.

We had no idea this phenomenon would be happening. We planned on maybe spending 5 minutes at the bridge, but ended up watching the ice for an hour at least.

We chatted with a ranger and he said that it looked completely different 2 hours earlier; it changes constantly depending on the wind. In fact, we drove by a couple hours later and there wasn't any ice jammed against the bridge at all. Seemed like we caught it at the perfect time.

The way the ice moved and slammed against each other, Jimmy said it was like plate tectonics, each flat of ice was like a continent.
You could visualize how mountains were formed as they butted up against each other.

And when that happened, ice shards would break off.
The sound of the shards rolling around in the water was really cool, too.

When some of the ice finally broke through to the other side of the bridge, it flowed freely to the river.

Of course I did another video for it. It's kinda long. You can skip to about a minute in to watch a big portion of it break through and flow through to the other side.

home sweet home

We've been home for 11 days. Getting back to our normal routines.

Just finished a slideshow video of the highlights of our trip.
Click on the full screen icon or the Youtube icon on the bottom right side of the video to watch it bigger.

Casper, WY to Vernal, UT

There isn't much to stop and see along the roadway from east central Wyoming to north eastern Utah. The drive is beautiful, but nothing to see other than what you can see out the window. Today was a Point A to Point B day.

Wyoming is Cowboy Country.

And cowgirl country, too!

Not sure what this guy was doing or observing. Interesting box he's in though. I know it's used to get across the river, but he was just sitting there.

Utah is that-a-way.

Northeastern Utah.

Bear's Lodge

More popularly known as Devil's Tower.
Devil's Tower is an amazing butte that rises above the hilly grasslands in Wyoming. Geologists agree that it was formed by magma forcing into or between other rock formations. But I'm no geologist and while I do think it's interesting how this could have happened, I can't understand the terminology well enough to paraphrase it here.

What I do love though, is the Native American legends of this tower.

They believe this place to be a very sacred site. Over 20 tribes have cultural affiliations here. There are different legends that have been passed down for generations.
Some Indigenous People call it Mato Tipila, meaning Bear Lodge.

Some of the legends talk about Indian children who were lost from their tribe. A great bear chased after them but when they jumped upon a great stump, it grew into the enormous stump formation it is today. The bear tried to claw up the stump to eat the children, creating the vertical impressions into the rock, but he could never reach them.

Minuteman and Badlands

If you're around my age or older, you can't help but remember the Cold War. It was the Western Bloc against the Eastern Bloc. Both sides had strategic nuclear weapon defenses ready to use in case one side had a military strike against the other. Thankfully, neither side called an order to strike.

There were several of these defensive missile sites in the Northern Plains. We toured one of them today. This particular one was built in the early 1980s. Operations shut down in the early 1990s after the cold war was over. The National Park Services maintain this site as it looked and operated then.
Two men worked in the small chamber on 24 hour shifts. They were the ones who would launch the missiles if the call to strike ever came.
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This is the steel-and-concrete blast door that seals the entrance to the control center. The door was painted as a twist to the old domino pizza commercials.
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This is the chamber as they were putting it into the ground. It's buried under 30 feet of dirt and sand.

We also visited an actual missile silo. The door covering the missile weighed 90 tons.
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And the missile below.
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I took a bunch of photos, too. But these from the National Park Services seem to be better. The glass on the door is just for our viewing purposes. They didn't originally have the glass. But my photos had a lot of reflections from the glass.

While we were near the Minuteman Launch Site, we took our last drive through the Badlands.
They look a little bit different than the ones in North Dakota.


Today's adventures were a little more somber than some of our other days, but still very important to our journey. I remember my mom being afraid of a nuclear attack in the 70s. She talked about building a bomb shelter under our house. I also remember the controversy about the missile silos being built. At the time I didn't know they were talking about something different from a grain silo. I didn't understand why anyone would be so upset about a grain silo. Of course, I learned about it in middle school and high school so I knew the difference by then. Also, Jimmy travelled the Soviet Union in May-June 1989, just 5 months before the Berlin Wall fell, which was a key moment in the ending of the Cold War.

Black Hills and Some Famous Monuments

We're staying in the Black Hills of South Dakota for a couple of days.

Today was mostly a leisurely day. We didn't have to wake up early, but road trips means laundry so we spent a couple hours doing that chore.
After laundry and lunch, we took a little scenic drive through some of the nearby black hills.

We didn't find any black gold though.

Then later that evening, we went to see South Dakota's famous monuments.


Mount Rushmore



and Crazy Horse

This is what Crazy Horse will look like when it's done. It stated in the 1940s. The artist died in the 1982 but the family continues his legacy. They'll still be working on it after we're both dead and buried.

We were there late enough to see both of them at night.