Pictures from this part of the trip can be found in the Travel East gallery.

Day 15: Friday May 27

Our original plan had been to drive out through Mammoth Hot Springs and the North Entrance. However, we had driven many of those roads already. While pretty, they would not be all that much fun with the trailer — steep hills and tight corners. Instead, we decided to leave through the West Entrance and drive toward Bozeman on our way to the Miles City KOA. This route was quite a bit longer, but we made up for that with higher speed limits and no twisty-turny roads.

We stopped to buy groceries at an Albertsons in Bozeman, and then continued east. We at lunch at a very windy rest area near Greycliff, Montana — there was so much wind that it the Casita was rocking, and it literally felt like we were eating in a boat rather than a trailer. We had a lot of driving to do, so our only real tourist stop was at Pictograph Cave State Park, which is one of the first large modern archaeological digs in Montana and the site of some ancient pictographs (many of which are unfortunately fading).

As we drove toward Miles City, we watched a storm build ahead of us for hours. Fortunately, although Miles City got a big rain squall about half an hour before we arrived, we didn't have to drive through it. The post-rain weather was beautiful, so we spent most of the evening reading with the windows open.

Day 16: Saturday May 28

The next morning, weather did not look good. It was dry initially, but then we ran into heavy rain. It was pretty obvious that the rain would follow us for the day, which presented a problem for our trip to Theodore Roosevelt National Park. A lot of the trails there are composed of bentonite clay that's called "gumbo" — when wet, it's simultanously very slippery and also sticks to everything. So, we discarded our plans to do any longer-duration hikes such as to the Petrified Forest trail. Instead, we unhitched the trailer in one of the parking lots, ate lunch, and then took the truck on the park's scenic drive. (This is why we have a small trailer; the Casita fits fine in a normal parking space.)

We stopped at most of the pull-offs and did short hikes, so the round trip took most of the afternoon. Fortunately, although we did get drizzle, we made it through the whole drive and got the trailer hitched up without getting too wet. However, by the time we made it to Medora Campground (just outside the park), it was pouring. The hike was really interesting. We saw Wind Canyon (soft sandstone shaped by wind), the site of an underground coal fire that lasted for decades (1950s-1970s), and learned about clinker. Clinker is basically a natural brick that forms when a burning coal seam "kiln-bakes" the clays around it. Given how much clinker is used for gravel in this area, there must have historically been a lot of burning coal seams.

At the campground, we accidentally took the wrong site and didn't notice until after we were fully set up (but they took pity on Julie and let us stay there). It was so messy outside that we just stayed in the trailer, turned on the heat, and watched the Giro all night. We did take one walk later in the evening, but got totally soaked, even with our rain jackets on. Plus, the whole place was paved in red clinker gravel, which we tracked everywhere when it was wet.

Day 17: Sunday May 29

Sunday morning, it was dry(ish), and we were woken up by what seemed like an unusually large amount of traffic in and out of the bathroom across from our campsite. It turned out a lot of the campers were there for a gravel road bike race that was starting in the city park just outside the campground.

Our first order of business was to fix the Andersen WDH, again. Like in Gros Ventre, we hadn't been able to connect it properly when we had hooked up after the scenic drive. The root cause was probably similar (unhitching with the truck at an angle to the trailer), but it was in much worse shape this time. We ended up in the parking lot for Chateau de Mores (which was closed) and spent another half an hour sorting it out before getting on the road.

Instead of going back into the National Park (per our original plan), we headed east to visit Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site, which is a location where several related tribes settled down to a non-nomadic existence for hundreds of years. It's also where Lewis & Clark met Sakakawea.

We took back roads to get there (US-85 and ND-200), so we drove through parts of the North Dakota oilfields that we had never seen before. The Knife River vistor center was really interesting, and we also got to see a reproduction earthen lodge (typically lasted 10 years) and walk among the ruins (really just some sunken depressions in the earth) of the original village. On the way out, we drove a few minutes to a separate village site and then drove to a few different Lewis and Clark sites on our way east to Bismark, including Fort Mandan.

Our final stop on the trip was the Jamestown Campground near Jamestown, North Dakota. When we got there, the owner joked that we might not fit in the site (which turned out to be 70' long) and told us that they'd had a lot of rain and the mosquitoes were running the place. He wasn't kidding about the mosquitoes! We've had worse mosquitoes on other trips, but still, these were pretty bad. We made dinner, took a short walk, and then settled down to finish up the Giro.

Day 18: Monday May 30

The next morning, we got up early, dumped for one last time, and were out of the campground before 8:00am. Most of the drive into Minnesota was rainy. Memorial Day traffic wasn't too bad until we stopped for lunch, and then just in the 20 minutes we sat there it went from empty to fairly crowded. We hit some construction delays in St. Cloud, but even with the delays the drive went well. We made it back home around 2:30pm, parked the Casita in the middle of the driveway, and rushed to unload most of it before the oncoming storm soaked us. Ken went to work on Tuesday, but Julie took the day off to straighten up the house, do some laundry, and buy groceries, etc.