More than halfway

One problem with having two cars and two drivers is that there is no passenger to take pictures (and the cats take lousy pictures). This is bad for blogging. I haven't been brave (stupid?) enough to try taking photos while driving, and all you'd see is a big blue and orange Budget logo, anyway.

We have stopped to take a few photos. On Sunday, we took a few pictures at the Columbia river in Washington:


Unfortunately, the camera settings were off, and so the picture came out a lot darker than it should have. This is the problem with switching between manual and semi-automatic modes; we're still playing with settings, and it looks like we got them wrong here.

We got a late start on Sunday, and so didn't make it as far as we'd hoped before stopping for the night Spokane, only 221 miles in. Yesterday was much better; we drove 486 miles before stopping in Livingston, MT, just north of Yellowstone.

Driving over the mountains was beautiful, but slow. The truck often couldn't do more than 50 when going uphill, and it wasn't really safe to do more than 55 or 60 coming down. Today, we made it into the flatter sections of Montana pretty early on, so things went much faster, and we passed the halfway point at around lunchtime. The 75 mph speed limits also help! We stopped at 565 miles tonight, and caught the tail end of a sunset in the Badlands:


There is also very little photographic evidence of the sunset, again because of bad camera settings and a lot of contrast between the setting sun and the shaded rock formations.

There were a couple of baby goats browsing in the grass with their mothers and generally cavorting around.


As the sun set, they curled up on the rocks to rest:


We could have made it a little further tonight, but we wanted to revisit the Badlands in the morning, when we have time to drive all the way through the park. And, since we'll check the camera settings this time, hopefully there will be more pictures to show.