8 Days, 13 States, 4237 Miles

What is there to see and do between Nashville and Bozeman? A lot, as it turned out! Especially if you travel by different routes coming and going. One of the first things that Emily and I talked about when we met was our mutual goal of visiting all 50 states. Going into our spring break road trip, Emily was down to 12 states she hadn’t visited, and I had 7 left on my list. Most of them were between here and Montana, so we planned our trip accordingly. Here’s our itinerary, with some highlights along the way.

Day 1 – We left Tennessee, drove through a bit of Kentucky, and made our first stop at Metropolis, Illinois, to see the Superman statue. We cut through Illinois to St. Louis, and kept driving. (St. Louis is great, but I’m heading back there this month with the 10-year-old for a special daddy-daughter trip, so we didn’t want to spoil it.) We made a brief stop at the Weldon Spring Nuclear Waste Adventure Trail (really!) in central Missouri, then stumbled upon the National Churchill Museum in Fulton, Missouri. We hadn’t planned that stop, but after seeing a sign for it, I pulled up the Wikipedia page for the museum to see why it was in Missouri. The resulting conversation when something like the following.

Me: “Um, just 15 minutes off our route there’s a Winston Church museum in a church that was designed by Christopher Wren in London in the 1600s and moved stone by stone to a Missouri college campus.”

Emily: “Let’s go there.”

I couldn’t ask for a better road trip partner.

After that brief detour, we stopped in Kansas City for the night. If you’re keeping track, that’s four states: TN, KY, IL, and MO. No new states for anyone yet.

Day 2 – Thanks to a tip from a picture book in our Airbnb, we learned that Walt Disney’s first animation studio was in Kansas City, so that was the first stop of the day. For some reason, the teenager was determined to visit a 7-11 for the first time (I suspect Stranger Things, where most of her current obsessions come from), so we found one on the Kansas state side of Kansas City, which gave us another state. Then we headed north to Iowa, detouring into Omaha in the afternoon to pick up Nebraska. Fun fact: Omaha has a fantastic art museum. We spent a couple of hours exploring the Joslyn Museum, where the teenager almost cried seeing her first Monet, and Emily saw our second Chihuly of the year (after visiting Tacoma, Washington, to visit her cousin back in February.) We pressed on into South Dakota, arriving at the world famous Corn Palace after sunset. It’s a palace. Covered in corn. We spent the night in a hotel in Oacoma because there aren’t a lot of Airbnbs in South Dakota. (I think that’s because there aren’t a lot of people in South Dakota.) We tried to stay in Airbnbs as much as we could on the trip, because they generally gave us more rooms for less money, but adjoining hotel rooms worked when necessary.

States: MO, KS, NE, IA, SD. Nebraska and South Dakota were new to me, and Emily picked up those two, plus Iowa.

Day 3 – Our third day was all about South Dakota. We started by visiting Dignity, a 50-foot statue celebrating Native Americans situated at a rest stop in Chamberlain, SD, not far from our hotel.  Definitely the most impressive rest stop we saw on our trip!

Then we traveled west to Badlands National Park. That first view of the Badlands took our breath away. It’s a landscape like none other I’ve seen, and it’s easy to imagine you’ve accidentally teleported to some alien planet. We were there in late March, so it was cold (in the 30s) and misty, which just added to the drama. I imagine it’s a different view entirely in the sunny summer. Late winter brought out the animals, however, and we saw a bunch. There was a particularly surprising moment when Emily got out the car to photograph one bighorn sheep and realized there was an entire herd just down the hill!

Meandering through Badlands took a few hours, so we headed to famous Wall Drug for lunch. I say “famous” because we had been seeing signs for Wall Drug for approximately 300 miles as we drove across South Dakota. There’s not a whole lot to look at along I-90 in SD, so the Wall Drug signs, each one unique and handpainted, made for great entertainment. Wall Drug made for a fun stop before we headed further west to see Mount Rushmore, which has been on my bucket list forever. “What do you call a rock band with four men who don’t sing?” asked the 14-year-old, about a dozen times on the way to Mount Rushmore. We got there just before sunset, and it was an impressive sight. I had been warned that it would be smaller than I expected, but thanks to those warnings, it turned out to be bigger and more imposing than I figured it would be. It’s hard to tell how big it is, since you aren’t actually very close to it when you visit. But it’s big, and we all enjoyed visiting it.

We stayed the night in a really wonderful Airbnb in Rapid City. Our host had four grown kids, so she had turned her basement into an Airbnb. We had three bedrooms and a kitchen and a great big common room for the price of a typical hotel room. After three days on the road, we really enjoyed stretching out in that basement.

States: Just SD.

Day 4 – This was one of our longest driving days, so we were thankful that the sun finally came out for us on Day 4. We left our spacious Airbnb in Rapid City and headed into Wyoming. Surprisingly, we hadn’t spotted any Wyoming license plates up until this point, so the older girls and I got pretty exited when we found one at a gas station just across the state line. This was the point where we established an important rule for our license plate game: You have to be in the car when you spot the license plate for it to count. Remember this for later.

Our first and only sightseeing stop was Devil’s Tower, a huge rock monolith that juts up from the ground and is visible for miles. It’s where they filmed the final scene of Close Encounters, and it’s the one thing I really wanted to see in Wyoming but didn’t when I visited with the girls back in 2015. We spent an hour or so there, hiking around the base of Devil’s Tower, and getting a close-up look at a prairie dog town. We had seen and fallen in love with prairie dogs in Badlands the day before, but the ones at Devil’s Tower were just a few feet from our car. It was fascinating (and Adorable Level 11) to hear them talk to each other in bird-like squeaks.

The rest of the day was driving, except for our pit stop in Sheridan, Wyoming, to fly kites. But the scenery was amazing, and the kids were in good spirits, thanks to the prairie dogs and the sunshine and the kites. We pulled into our Airbnb in Bozeman–an entire house this time, since we were staying two nights–after dark.

States: SD, WY, MT. Both Wyoming and Montana were new for Emily.

Day 5 – This was the day I paid for the road trip. I spent the day leading a workshop and talking with faculty at Montana State, while Emily took the kids exploring in Bozeman. They enjoyed shopping in downtown Bozeman, ate a meal in a cafe where people wore actual cowboy hats, and saw the dinosaurs at the Museum of the Rockies. Later in the afternoon, they picked me up from my speaking gig, and we decided, somewhat spur of the moment, to head to Yellowstone. We hadn’t planned to hit Yellowstone, but we talked about it earlier in the day and the weather looked promising (snow can make getting to Yellowstone challenging) so we went for it. And I’m glad we did! Yellowstone is amazing, between the scenery and the hot springs and the giant mammals. At one point our car was surrounded by a herd of buffalo! Seriously. There were so many animals. The kids loved it, and they took like a thousand pictures. And the national park was just beautiful in the late winter, with everything (including some roads) covered in snow.

The Churchill museum. The Disney studio. Yellowstone. I love that I have a partner who likes to plan, but who also likes to go off-script and see the unexpected. Serendipity is one of the best parts of a road trip!

States: Just MT. It was very relaxing to spend two nights in a row at the same place!

Day 6 – Remember that license plate game rule where you have to be in the car to count a plate? As we packed our SUV the morning we left Bozeman, the 10-year-old volunteered to help. I didn’t think anything of this, since she helped pack the car most mornings on the trip. What I didn’t realize was that she had spotted an Alaska license plate on the car parked on the street behind our SUV, and she wanted the chance to get in our vehicle so she could mark Alaska off her list! She had hoped I wouldn’t see the Alaska plate, which had eluded us during five days of travel, but, in fact, I had spotted it, too. I did the exact same thing she did, sneaking into the car when she wasn’t looking so I could count Alaska! We take our license plate competition seriously.

We took four days to get to Bozeman and spent a day in and near Bozeman. That gave us only three days to get back to Nashville, which meant long driving days. Thanks to Roadside America, however, we didn’t get bored. Our big stop for the day was Pompey’s Pillar National Monument, just east of Billings. It’s a rock outcropping way smaller than Devil’s Tower. It’s claim to fame is that William Clark, of the Lewis and Clark expedition, stopped there in 1806, naming the rock after Sacagawea’s son, and (this is awesome) carving his name on the rock. You can see his signature today, framed and protected from the elements, one of the only existing signs of the Lewis and Clark expedition outside of a museum. We spent a fun two hours hiking to and up and down the monument, and we learned a lot about Lewis and Clark thanks to the exhibits and that podcast episode we listened to.

The rest of the day featured a lot of driving; that epic round of StoryCubes I mentioned in my last post; a stop to see Glendisaurus, the life-sized triceratops statue outside Glendive, Montana, where we perfected our “flee in terror” group shot pose; and our first and only proper sit-down dinner of the week, at the Trapper’s Kettle in Belfield, North Dakota. The restaurant was highly thematic, with the salad bar located in a canoe, soup available in small metal pots, and a variety of animal heads mounted on the walls. (We saw our only moose of the trip there!) I got the buffalo burger I had been wanting all week, over the objections of our buffalo-loving children, and the 14-year-old got a pancake bigger than her head. After a lot of hours on the road and a lot of road food (at one point we did lunch at the McDonald’s drive through for $12 for all six of us), I enjoyed the heck out of our proper dinner at the Trapper’s Kettle.

Sadly, we didn’t have time to visit the Theodore Roosevelt National Park. We saw enough of it to check it off our list of national parks, but we’ll have to go back sometime. We also missed Salem Sue, the world’s largest statue of a cow, who overlooks the town of New Salem, North Dakota. You’d think we wouldn’t miss a 38-foot-tall Holstein, but it was dark and snowing something fierce. That last hour or two of driving before reaching our Airbnb outside Bismarck was harrowing. No visibility and, frankly, nothing to see anyway in this part of North Dakota. Other than Salem Sue, I guess. Next time, Salem Sue, next time.

States: MT, ND. North Dakota was new for Emily and for me.

Day 7 – This was our coldest morning of the trip. It was all of 12 degrees in North Dakota when we started driving. That’s not a number one should see on a thermometer. North Dakota was flat and covered with snow. Just miles of white nothing as far as you could see. South Dakota at least had those Wall Drug signs. There’s not much to look at in North Dakota!

We did, however, manage a roadside America trifecta on this long driving day: three giant animal statues in three different states! We saw Dakota Thunder, the world’s largest buffalo statue, in Jamestown, ND. The statue was erected back in 1959 by a local college art teacher. It’s big enough that you can walk under its belly!

Then there was the world’s largest state of a prairie chicken in Rothsay, MN. I’m not sure how much competition there is for that title. This prairie chicken is in the middle of “booming,” puffing out orange air sacs on its neck while trying to attract a mate. On the way to Rothsay, we listened to a really charming Memory Palace podcast episode about prairie chickens and the scientists who saved them from extinction.

The last stop in our roadside America trifecta was the world’s largest Sinclair dinosaur statue in Wisconsin Dells, WI. If you’ve traveled out West, you’ve probably seen a Sinclair gas station. Their mascot is a cute green brontosaurus (or whatever paleontologists are calling them these days), which seems appropriate since gas is basically made of old dinosaurs. There was a Sinclair gas station in Wisconsin that built a life-sized version of their mascot coming out of their building. Sadly, the gas station was sold, and so now there’s a random green dinosaur sticking out of a non-Sinclair gas station. Still, worth a visit and another “flee in terror” group shot!

States: ND, MN, WI. Minnesota and Wisconsin were both new for Emily.

Day 8 – You know that thing about serendipity I said earlier? Well, we woke up in our hotel room in Madison, Wisconsin, on the final day of our trip, and, as I mapped our route home, I realized that Chicago was only 15 minutes out of our way. After about four seconds of consideration, we decided to go to Chicago. And we did.

After a quick stop in Rockford, Illinois, to see the Rock Guardians (roadside America at its finest) and take our best album cover group shot yet (there were train tracks involved), we cruised into Chicago a little before lunchtime.

None of the kids had ever visited Chicago, but Emily and I had, just last year. After a week on the road, visiting some amazing natural wonders, historical sites, and weird statues, it was great to have a little time together on an urban adventure. Our first stop was the Bean, the mirrored bean-shaped sculpture in Millennium Park officially known as Cloud Gate. The kids loved running around and under it, finding their reflections in the strange surface. We strolled around Millennium Park for a while, looking at the skyscrapers around us. I think that’s when the 14-year-old fell in love with Chicago. I’m fully expecting a few college applications to go to the Windy City in a few years.

The Chicago Cultural Center wasn’t far away. Emily and I hadn’t seen it, and I had read that they had an impressive Tiffany glass skylight. They did, but it was the art exhibits that were the most fun. We walked in the lobby where there was a sign about the current exhibition, and the 10-year-old said, “Ooh! Keith Haring!” It turns out that she had done a project on Keith Haring, who does murals and public art in Chicago and elsewhere, in her art class last year, and she totally remembered his stuff! Our family loves art, both viewing it and creating it, so we had a blast at the Keith Haring exhibit, which included a station where the kids got to make some art and add it to a giant wall full of public contributions.

We took a ride on the L train, which was the 7-year-old’s favorite part of the trip, by far. He could have ridden the L train loop all day, I think. We browsed at Blick, an amazing art store that we’d ordered from online but never visited. We saw Flamingo, an impressive Alexander Calder statue that Emily and I had found during our last visit to Chicago. The 14-year-old got to see the theater where the musical Hamilton plays, which only cemented her love for Chicago. And we wrapped up our afternoon in the city with an early dinner of Chicago deep dish pizza, which was really good. We didn’t leave Chicago until 6pm or so, which meant we didn’t get home until around 3 in the morning, but it was so worth it. It was the perfect ending to an epic road trip.

States: WI, IL, IN, KY, and home to TN. No new states for Emily or me, but thanks to our different routes coming and going, I picked up three new states on the trip and Emily picked eight! Now we’re each down to four states we haven’t visited: Alaska and Hawaii for both us, Michigan and Idaho for Emily, and New Mexico and Maine for me. We have a few more road trips ahead of us!

And let me say again how proud I am of our road warriors. Six of us in the car for eight days, traveling all over America. The 4-year-old had a great attitude (most of the time), in spite of being the youngest and having a broken arm. The 7-year-old never failed to get out of the car and explore on every single stop. The 10-year-old learned that she can entertain herself for 50+ hours in the car. And the 14-year-old was the best big sister we could ask for. We’ve only been a family since January, and it was a little risky to throw us all together in tight quarters for such a long period of time. But the risk paid off. We made memories together, had fun together, learned to get along together, and bonded together. Six of us, exploring the world together.