Pieces of Wyoming...

Food

There are several more items to add to this particular post, but I don't have all the photos yet... Once I do, I will update it with more of the food we experienced...

This was brunch the day before we left on our road trip.  Mellissa pulled out her French influenced culinary skills on us and made mushroom, egg and goat cheese stuffed crepes.  They were very good and very pretty. 

At RiRa's Irish Pub in Louisville we had Fish & Chips and some chicken burger thingy with sweet potato fries. 

We dove head first into the Kentucky food scene with a visit to KFC. No chicken though, only potatoes. They thought we were crazy and it took a girl from Cincinatti to explain to the native Kentucky girl what a "jojo" is. Mellissa shared hers with The Colonel. I shared mine with Mellissa.

Next is Portillos for a Chicago Style Dog...  I'm not a fan of hotdogs, I actually cannot stand them, but it was impressed upon me that I HAD to try a Chicago Style hotdog and from it was unanimous from all sides that Portillos was the absolute best place to get hotdogs.  I was also told that I needed to have cheese fries with it.  I have to admit it, the Chicago Style Dog was good, I could barely taste the hotdog, which was my favorite part.  I loved the peppers!  Yummy.  The cheese fries I could have lived without, it was like macaroni and cheese with fries instead of macaroni.  Not that cheap storebrand mac and cheese though, like Kraft Mac and Cheese... the good one and I've been passing that stuff up in the grocery store for months, so this took care of that fix I've been denying. 

We also had pizza from Gino's East in Chicago.  It was yummy and I'm not sure that I want to have pizza anywhere ever again after that.  I have to upload the picture after I get it from Mellissa (got it!).  I'm glad she got a small because that thing was so thick with crust, cheese and sausage... holy cats!  Oh, the best part, green peppers does NOT mean bell peppers.  I was ready to pick them off, but when we got the pizza, it was those hot & sweet peppers. 
 
 

Wrigley Field Nachos.  I have nothing else to say.

The Badlands... they're so naughty

This place was strangely quiet, kind of like the way the way the air feels insulated at night after a heavy snow fall, like everything – voices, footsteps and cars – is dampened or muffled. The spires were very cool and vast. It was like a forest of stone instead of trees, of which there were none. We drove around the scenic byway and stopped at several places to look at the points of interest. They all looked the same, as you can tell by the photos. We did see lots and lots of prairie dogs, they were running across the grasslands, or just standing up watch us watch them. I did see a bunny while we were climbing among the spires and although there were lots of poisonous snake warning signs, we didn’t see any. I suppose that was a good thing.

Pardon my Wiki here, but the information about the development of the area is pretty cool, so… learn something - Approximately 75 million years ago the Earth’s climate was warmer than it is now, and a shallow sea covered much of the region we know as the Great Plains. Stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada and from western Iowa to western Wyoming, this sea teemed with life. In today's Badlands the bottom of that sea appears as a grayish-black sedimentary rock called the Pierre (pronounced "peer") shale. This layer is an incredibly rich source of fossils, for creatures sank to the bottom of the sea when they died and over a long course of time became fossils. Within the park, the fossilized remains of a variety of animals have been found. Baculites, an extinct cephalopod, had a squid-like body with a long cylindrical shell tightly coiled at the one end. Inside the shell were individual chambers containing either gas or liquid for buoyancy control. Clams, crabs and snails in great numbers have also been found. Outside the park, the Pierre shale has yielded abundant remains of ancient fish; mosasaurs, giant marine lizards; pterosaurs, flying reptiles; Hesperonis, a diving bird something like a modern loon. Why have the rocks inside the park, which are so rich in invertebrate fossils, yielded so few marine creatures with backbones? Questions like these puzzle paleontologists and earth scientists who continue to search in hope of answering some of the questions about the park's and Earth's rich past.

Eons pass and Mellissa & Deanna show up... The pushing and shoving of continental plates leads to an active period of mountain building in the ancestral Rocky Mountains. This causes the land under the inland sea to rise, and in turn, the sea retreats and drains away. In time, the area that we now know as the Badlands is exposed to air and sunshine, yet it looks nothing like the landscape that we are familiar with today

The climate is humid and warm, and rainfall is abundant. On the new land a subtropical forest develops, dense and dark. It flourishes for millions of years. Eventually, though, the climate slowly grows cooler and drier and the forest gives way, first to savanna, then later on to grasslands so much more like the present landscape.

Today, after a heavy rainstorm in the Badlands, vivid red bands stand out against the buff tones of the buttes. Geologists and paleontologists tell us that these are fossilized soils, which make up much of the Badlands rocks. Fossil soils can tell us a great deal about the climate history of the Badlands; they also impart much of the colorful banding to Badlands rocks. Perhaps the best of all, the loose, crumbling rocks formed from these ancient soils hold one of the greatest collections of fossil mammals on Earth.

Mount Rushmore

We're going to petition to get this new head added to the four that are already there.  I think it's time a chick is added to the mis and Mellissa's kind of big deal.  I'd like to see the sunglasses stay and possibly have her hair down, because pinned up like it is in the photo, it's shorter than the rock boys behind her. 

This place was pretty cool.  It made me feel all patriotic, especially when Ms. South Dakota showed up and was accosted by all the Asians for pictures with them... oh and the Pro Life gang.  I believe that she refused to take a photo with their "choice" emblazened across the front of their teeshirts in large, bold letters. 

I was a bad girl, maybe from too much time in the badlands and got a picture of her from behind while she was bent over posing with a little girl.  It is NOT very flattering and I know I wouldn't want my ass photographed in such an unflattering way... Her's was small and the photo still managed to make it look like something Sir Mix-a-Lot would write a song about.

Custer State Park was very pretty, I loved driving along Needles Highway and Sylvan Lake was very cool as well, although it was a bit crowded, which made it difficult to get any really good photographs of the area.  Mellissa went jogging around the lake while I walked the dogs. 

Sioux Falls South Dakota

words to follow later...  I need to hit the road

Minnesota... or HELL

What we originally thought was heat lightening turned out to be something entirely different... We had visited Mellissa's friend Liz in Wisconsin a couple of hours earlier and were making our way across Southeast Minnesota and were watching the lightening flash on the horizon. We both thought it was heat lightening... the sky looked relatively normal and non-threatening. We were going to stop and let the dogs out at the next rest area and before jumping out of the car I noticed the trees billowing in the wind, which made me think that it probably wasn't heat lightening, but an actual thunderstorm. I'd been through plenty of those in Florida and wasn't that worried about it... until a few seconds later. 

We were both at the back door of the car, getting ready to leash the dogs when the sky light up bright white and we both gasped and jumped into the Jeep. Like it would have done any good at that point right? Once you see the lightening, it’s too late and not to mention… our asses and legs were still hanging out of the Jeep. Mellissa screams, forget it, lets' go. She practically mows me down to save herself (kidding) and when I make it around to the driver's side of the Jeep screams at me "Go, Go, Go!"

In a matter of minutes, the sky changed completely.

Yes, that is an actual picture of the horizon. I drove so fast trying to get the heck out of there and at times I thought we were nearly through it. Mellissa was freaking out (so was I) and I told her that I thought we were through the worst of it because I could see light on the horizon, the tornado warning issues on the radio were all nearly expired and I was driving like a bat out of hell. Then the freeway curved, straight toward the pitch-black sky, or the bright orange sky with the pitch-black cloud that sat in the center of it. I knew I was wrong about being through the worst of it because it was right there in front of us. I remember my brain going "uhhhhh..." then I thought “well, I just wont say anything and hopefully she wont notice.” She was nice enough to not point out that I was WRONG... until we talked and laughed about it the next day.

Like I said before, I drove as fast as I could and fortunately, we made it through Minnesota alive. We didn't really know how bad it was until Mellissa overheard people talking at a gas station just before the South Dakota border and they mentioned several houses being destroyed. We looked it up on the internet the next day and found the below at Weather.com. There are other videos out there as well. Just watching them makes my heart race.

  http://www.weather.com/outlook/videos/iwitness-tornado-forms-on-camera-17595#17595

Chicago

I love it here.  I could live here.  I wish we could have stayed longer and seen more of it.  I took Uzume & Itachi to their first dog park, but only let them run around as long as no other dogs were in there, because they're big bullies and like to start trouble.  I was surprised that the two of them seemed to be fine amongst all the noise.  There's always a lot of traffic and the peeps of Chicago love their horn...  A LOT.  They seemed to take it in stride and not be affected by it too much, they also moved among the foot traffic fairly well, Itachi did try his crotch rocket launch at one person, put I kept his leash pretty short fortunately for that guy.  The picture to the left is looking back down Grand Avenue from a park alongside the river, right next to the Caribou Cafe.  After we left here we went to Gino's East and bought a small pizza.  The picture above is the park (the area that dogs were NOT allowed) that we were at. 

The architecture is pretty cool, all except for that huge eyesore, Trump International Tower.  It's hideous and placed justly, right next to a McDonalds.  hehehe. 

The Chicago Cubs...

Wrigley Field is so awesome! I didn’t get to try out every single seat, but I’m pretty certain that there isn’t a single bad seat in that stadium, or surrounding the stadium. The game was great! The Cubbies beat the Oakland A’s 6 to 2.

I’ve wanted to visit Chicago and go to a Cubs’ game for a while. I’ve been to Chicago several times, but always for work and never for any length of time that allowed me to see much of the city. So, Mellissa bought tickets and we braved the “L” to Wrigley… we consumed the nachos of death, drank that horrible Old Style beer, which we were informed is the “official” beer of the Chicago Cubs… uh, they need to upgrade, and we cheered, shouted and sang along with Cedric the Entertainer for the 7th Inning Stretch.   

 We both bought the same shirt, but agreed to check with each other before wearing it so that we don't both wear it at the same time. I couldn't believe the circus of street vendors outside the stadium, it was crazy and nothing like I have EVER seen at a Mariner's game. The only mayhem after an M's game is the rush to get the closest place that serves cold beer.