US Road Trip - Part One

 

I traveled the country on my own in late July, car and tent, to see as much as I could. I took US-2 across the Michigan UP all the way to Glacier National Park in Montana, and then doubled back through Yellowstone along the Oregon Trail (US-20).

 

I call this Part One, because I realize there are several other trips like this I will have to take to see everything I need to!  

 

What I Saw on the Trip:

• Six or seven black bear (nothing like the Alaska trip)
• One grizzly (through a telescope)
• A dozen longhorn sheep
• Dozens of mountain goat
• Prairie dogs
• Four moose
• Dozens of bison (one three feet away)
• Three elk
• Eight pelican
• Two osprey, several hawk
• A bald eagle
• Some pretty strange Americans

Trip Casualties:

• One T-Mobile smartphone (Glacier rocks took it in a fit of rage)
• One Zen mp3 player (lost literally in "The Middle of Nowhere," Ainsworth, Nebraska, within a 5 minute span of time)

What I Read/Heard on The Trip:

Read:

• Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
• Mark Haddon, Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
• Local newspapers

Heard:

• Kenneth Davis, America's Hidden History
• Seamus Heaney, trans., Beowulf
• Stephen King, Just After Sunset
• Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran
• Frank McCourt, Teacher-Man
• Isaac Asimov, I Robot
• Max Brooks, World War Z
• David McCullough, 1776