What a Difference a Day Makes!

Yesterday it was sprinkling as we hooked up to head west and we drove in rain almost all the way through western North Dakota and into eastern Montana. It was chilly enough that I actually put a sweatshirt on for the first time since last November.

The western part of North Dakota near Teddy Roosevelt National Park has some of my most favorite Western scenery. We have camped in this part of the country before and enjoyed it immensely.

Several years ago I flew out to North Dakota for a Friday meeting to work with their rural providers to assist them with formation of a state rural health association. In those days, you often got a much better airfare if you stayed over Saturday night. The ND group loaned me a car and I spent Saturday exploring Teddy Roosevelt's North Dakota haunts -- and in the process fell in love with the ND badlands. I think they are more dramatic and colorful than the Badlands National Park in South Dakota!

We only skirted the edges of the badlands yesterday, but you could still see the incredible bands of color, especially the reds...

Even through all of the downpour, the hills are gorgeous!

This was the scene this morning. Mainly blue skies with scattered clouds that soon left. The Miles City, Montana KOA is located in the midst of what they describe as "mature" cottonwood trees. It's very pretty. Some of the trees are very old and have huge trunks -- if they could only talk!

We did drive around a bit this afternoon (after sleeping in VERY late this morning!) and went to take a good look at the Yellowstone River which flows along the edge of town.

It's a fairly large river, but according to the locals it is very low as evidenced by all of the exposed beaches and sandbars.

The Tongue River runs along the edge of the KOA kampground. We followed it down to where it flowed into the Yellowstone --

It got quite warm today, into the nineties (no sweatshirt today!). They were lots of rigs and boat trailers parked along the Yellowstone's sandbars and we saw a lot of people wading and swimming.

If we weren't getting anxious to get back to Washington State, we would certainly be lingering longer in this part of the world.