White House Garden Tour

In the middle of October, the White House opened up its garden for tours.  Liz was able to get some tickets through one of her contacts so I went along with herself and her mum who was visiting, I don't like to ever turn down an invitation to go to the White House!

I only have a few photos from the visit on this computer - I'm trying to catch up with the blog before I leave DC but have already sent my other laptop with most of the photos on it back to the UK!

Barack's putting green...

Cocktail time on the rooftop of the W Hotel...

Nats Playoffs

In October the Washington Nationals made it to the play offs for the first time in 79 years!  We were lucky enough to get tickets to 2 of the play off games.

It was such a different atmosphere to a regular game.  Normally the place is less than 1/2 empty when a game starts and slowly more people drift in to their seats but it's still rarely more than 3/4s full.  For this playoff game, everyone was in their seat at the start of the game and we didn't leave our seats for the whole game!  It was brilliant game, especially because the Nats won!

As the Nats won last night, it meant we were back at Nats Park the following night for the final game of the series.  Whoever won this game, would go through to the next round.

It was Chris' birthday so we were hoping he got a good birthday present!

The game started so well, the Nats were 6-0 up by the end of the 3rd inning.

Bryce scored a home run...

Teddy won the President's race...

Then it all started to go wrong.  The Cardinals scored 3 in the 4th and 5th innings so the atmosphere started to dip.  Going into the 9th inning the score was 7-5, then the Cardinals scored 4 runs to win the game.  There was just silence in the ball park, everyone just stood up and quietly walked out.  What a difference to the atmosphere 24 hours earlier!

Nebraska and Iowa

Our route back to Chicago took us into Nebraska.  I wasn't expecting much from this state but we decided to stop off in Omaha.  I was really surprised, it's actually a really nice city.  It's obviously not a touristy city but I can imagine it's a great city to live in.  There were lots of coffee shops and nice shops, it just had a really nice funky vibe. 

Our final state of the trip was Iowa.  We drove to Des Moines to Drake University to see a college football game.  It's not a big college so there wasn't a big crowd but it was fun, I actually think I prefer it to watching an NFL game.  And they had the best mascot ever - a grumpy bulldog who strutted up and down the side of the field!

When we arrived back in Chicago we had a bit of spare time to make a another visit to Pizza Due for for some more Chicago style pizza and we also went to the Robie House, another Frank Lloyd Wright designed home.

South Dakota

Whenever anyone asked me what is the one thing that I really, really wanted to see in America, my answer was always Mount Rushmore.  I don't know why exactly, it just seemed like such an iconic image of America, I felt like I had to see it while we were here.

Finally we had the opportunity on this trip to visit.  We were lucky that we had beautiful blue skies for our visit and it was reasonably quiet.  We walked the loop trail underneath the Presidents and visited the sculptures studio.  It was so interesting learning about the history and we were lucky enough to meet one of the Rushmore Workers that worked on the sculpture over 70 years ago!

 

 

From Mount Rushmore we went to see the Crazy Horse Sculpture which is only a few miles away.  The sculpture was started in 1948 and it still has a really long way to go before it will be completed.  

It is being funded from donations rather than any government money, hence it's taking so long to carve.  

Our next stop in South Dakota was Cosmos.  A weird place where gravity plays tricks on you.  The tour guide tells you how it's unexplained and is something cosmic about the place.  I didn't buy that and tried to figure out a rational explanation for it, I'm sure it's some kind of optical illusion but either way it's really fun.  It was hard to stand up sometimes, it felt like you were drunk and at other times it felt like you were standing up straight but to everyone else you were standing at an angle.

In the picture below it was possible to lean really far forwards so that you were almost flat but with your feet just on two blocks of wood.  I'm not looking convinced in the photo but I did manage to lean forward a lot further than it looks.

We were staying the night in Rapid City so we decided to go and check out the town later in the afternoon.  There is a president on every corner of downtown.  I managed to find one of my favourites - FDR.  

The next morning it was time to head to continue our journey across South Dakota but we made time for a must do stop on every road trip in this area - Wall Drug.  There are signs for miles on the highway advertising the free ice water and 5c coffee!  It's a weird place, its a huge drug store that sells all sorts of things and also has amusements.

The weather had been lovely for our whole trip so far and although it was still nice, it had suddenly turned bitterly cold so our next stop in Badlands ended up being a bit of a quicker stop than originally planned and it was more a bit of a drive through tour than a nice walk!

Our last stop in South Dakota was to a Minuteman Missile Silo.  We had visited a missile silo when we were in Arizona a couple of years ago but I had been too scared to go down and Chris had to go on his own.  This time I was determined to do it and I'm so glad that I did it was so interesting.  It was like walking back into the 80s.  Our tour was guided by one of the former missileers and there were only 4 of us on the tour so we were able to ask loads of questions.  I'd really recommend a visit here if you find yourself in the area.

Devil's Tower, Wyoming

We spent Monday night in Sheridan, Wyoming which was a lovely, small town.  After spending a couple of hours on Tuesday morning walking around we drove on to Devil's Tower.  We knew were getting close to the tower but were expecting to see it from miles away, suddenly we turned the corner and there it was...

We walked the loop around the bottom of the tower.  It's really interesting to see if close up, you can see the way that the rock is formed into columns and as the rock erodes sometimes it falls off in these columns.  There were a few climbers making their way up the rock, it was fascinating to watch them but it looked like they were making very slow progress!

Later in the afternoon we drove over the South Dakota border for a stop at Deadwood.  I had read a few reviews about the town so kind of knew what to expect but as it was on our route we thought we'd stop and see it for ourselves.  It was horrible!  I wouldn't recommend stopping even it's on your route.  From my photos you might think the town looks quite nice but every single one of those building is filled with a casino.  The whole place is really naff.  We went into the visitor center and read about why they decided to do this to the town, they basically needed the money to restore it all.  I can't help thinking there must have been other options and I think it's a real shame and has really ruined what could have been an interesting town to visit.

Yellowstone

There is so much to see in Yellowstone and the few days that we had was no where near long enough to see everything. I had allocated Sunday as our geyser day and Monday as our wildlife spotting day, although we had already done quite well spotting buffalo, a bear and a coyote on the previous day.

We drove up to the Norris Geyser Basin first thing in the morning. Steamboat geyser is the biggest attraction here, it's the world's tallest active geyser.

The picture below is Vixen geyser.  This is just a small one but it scared the life out of us by spurting up just as we were walking past.

We continued driving south to the lower geyser basin stopping at a few different places along the way.

There were some very active geysers spouting steam everywhere!

At the midway geyser basin is the Grand Prismatic Spring which is probably one of the most photographed sights in Yellowstone.  

After stopping at the Upper Geyser Basin we were almost all geysered out so headed to our hotel for the night the Old Faithful Inn.

We had one final geyser that we had to see when we got there - the Old Faithful.  It's a few steps away from the hotel and is one of the most reliable and impressive geysers in the park.  It goes off roughly once an hour and puts on a show for about 5 minutes.  

When I booked our hotels in Yellowstone there wasn't much choice left but I was surprised to find a room available at the Old Faithful Inn which is the famous park lodge.  The catch was that the room didn't have a bathroom!  I decided to book it anyway because there wasn't really anything else available  and I am so pleased that I did.  The room was amazing.  Most of the rooms in the lodge are in a modern wing built around the back but we had one of the original rooms in the log part of the lodge, it was so cute and cosy.  The shared bathroom wasn't an issue at all, it was very clean and right across from our room so we could just dart in there.

The hotel lobby is stunning so we found ourselves a couple of chairs and some hot apple cider and relaxed for a while reading our books before dinner in the lodge's dining room.

The next morning we had a very early start for our wildlife spotting day.  We decided to drive to the Lamar Valley which is supposed to be one of the best areas for spotting wildlife.  Our first spot was a lone elk then we saw lots and lots of bison.  They have an annoying habit of blocking the road so it was a very slow drive while we kept stopping to wait for them to move.  

At one point we had to wait quite a while for a herd to cross a bridge, when we finally decided to drive over we ended up being surrounded by a few stragglers which was a bit scary!  They are a bit unpredictable and will sometimes decided to ram the car so we were a bit worried about our tiny little rental car and kept very still while we waited for them to pass!

The Lamar Valley was beautiful but we only managed to see lots of bison and a few pronghorn. We were really hoping to see a grizzly!

From Lamar Valley we drove back to Mammoth Hot Springs.  

After a walk around the springs we went into the small town where there were a herd of elk. September is rutting season and the elk can be really dangerous to be around at this time, they cause havoc when they decide to walk into town. The Park Rangers had cordoned off the area where they were sitting to make sure no one got too close.

We decided to take the Beartooth highway out of the park, it was a long, slow and at times scary drive but the views were beautiful and definitely worth it.