Saturday May 29, 2010 - Hill City, South Dakota to Buffalo, Wyoming

We packed up our campsite this morning after three exhausting nights of windy weather that would bend the tent in on us at times. Gena and I didn't get much sleep, but the kids eventually got accustomed to it and slept pretty well. This was our first time camping as a family in two years. It was good to know that we could do it, even if we weren't exactly roughing it in terms of food and shower facilities!

As we piled the kids into the car, I received a call from a Seminary friend of mine who I knew had a parish in the area. I had looked for the parish earlier during our stay but didn't find it. There was a mix-up in communication, with each of us expecting the other to call and work out the time and date of a get together. It was great to talk with him, and we agreed to swing by his church to say hi. This turned into an invitation for lunch at his home with his family, which was very enjoyable. They have three children slightly younger than our own, and they had a blast playing together while the big people talked and caught up briefly on the last four years. Sam has been in his current parish just a few months, and it seems like a good fit in many respects.

After lunch we hit the road. This was a more relaxed travel day, as we had no set destination to reach. We had just made the decision that another 10-hour day of driving was not the best option for us, and so we would break the drive from Hill City, SD to Jackson, WY into two days. We discovered that the Black Hills extend into Wyoming, and they accompanied us for a little ways on our journey. The one thing that I wanted to do on this leg of our journey was to take a slight detour to Devils Tower.

So we drove about 50 miles round trip out of our way to stop and see the site made famous by Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It was certainly impressive - if not based on it's size, then moreso based on it's unusual look, and how it juts strangely out of the land, separated from any of the hills around it. We only stayed a few minutes, but it was worth the drive.

Then the land flattened out again, but differently from the midwest we had seen in Nebraska. This was grazing land, and it had a different quality from the cultivated croplands to the south. And always on the horizon was a line of mountains drawing us forward. It was a cloudy day - a storm was moving our direction from the west, and we ran into it in the last couple hours of our drive.

At times the rain was intense. Most of the time it was intermittent and not too hard. The sky seemed huge, and the clouds were amazing combinations of consistency and altitude. Incredible stratifications of fluffy purple and grey and pink. It was the first real rain we've had to deal with while actually driving. Fortunately, traffic was very light in the middle of nowhere, Wyoming!

We stopped for dinner in Gillette, Wyoming. We dined at what appeared to be one of the few local restaurants, a place called The Chophouse. While not apparent from the simple exterior, this was probably the nicest place to eat in Gillette. After we got over our sticker-shock, we figured out a way to eat as reasonably as possible. The food was acceptable, but nothing mind-blowing. Perhaps if we had indulged in some of the local beef dishes, we would have been more impressed. But that was outside of our budget, so we made do with salads and shared kids' dishes.

We stopped an hour later in Buffalo, Wyoming. Accommodations were not overly abundant, and with it being Memorial Day weekend and all I decided to just get a room at the first place we looked - a Comfort Inn. I was pleased to note later online that there weren't really any cheaper places in town, and this was definitely a comfortable place to stay.

It was a good - if short - day's drive. The scenery had been truly impressive on a scale not equaled in most of our other drives. The east and the midwest have a softness to their landscapes - rolling hills cushioned with soft, dense forestation. The landscape rolls buy, undulating with the twists and turns of the road, dropping away here and rising up there, gradually and gently. But the landscape of the west is different - abrupt, sudden, dramatic. Nothing and then everything, everything and then nothing. The forestation is prickly with pines that stab upwards in defiance of the elements above and the at times rocky land below. It's a stark beauty, but one that we're familiar with.

As we fell asleep at the base of the Big Horn Mountains, we had the feeling for the first time that we were back in familiar territory - despite never having been to Wyoming before. We were back West again, and the West will likely always be our home, at least in our hearts.