Driving through Kansas both Lauren and I agreed that the sky seemed bigger than normal. Everything was so flat and open that the sky just seemed to wrap around you on all sides. We figured if the sky seemed big here, then Montana's sky must be HUGE.

I don't know if it was hyped expectations, but the sky in Montana disappointed me. It was big. Indeed yes. But with only a couple of exceptions, it didn't seem any bigger than the sky in Kansas.

I guess Montana didn't have much else going for it, so it had to claim "Big Sky Country" to give people some reason to come visit their state.

Montana is a huge state, but the ability to do about 85m.p.h. across the state (a combination of long straight roads and not a cop in sight), we were in Wyoming after only a day and a half.

It was here where we found Devil's Tower which will look very familiar to those who have seen the Steven Speilberg film, "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." This is the mountain where the aliens landed. At over 600 feet tall, and with its signature ridges, formed by quickly cooling magma inside a since-eroded voclano, this mountain is truly an eerie sight. According to Native American folklore, the ridges where formed by a giant bear scratching at the rock. One of the old Indian names for this place is "Bear's House."

And again, how can any American take a road trip like this and not visit this most famous of American landmarks: Mount Rushmore.

People always told me that Mount Rushmore is never as big as you picture it. But it looked plenty big and impressive to Lauren and me... though, not impressive enough to pay the park entrance fee of eight dollars. We prefered to take pictures from a turnout in the road.

We'd read about Wall Drug in the book ROAD TRIP USA, and we'd been seeing signs for it since Billings, Montana. So even though it was running late, almost three o'clock at this point, and we wanted to be half-way through Minnesota by the end of the day, we stopped into this world famous drugstore in the middle of nowhere in western South Dakota.

I'm glad we made the stop. The Wall Drug story is a true testament to the American dream. Struggling to stay in business during the Depression, its owners got the bright idea to start advertising "Free Ice Water", and ever since, the store has been a thriving business.

We stopped in, bought some souveniers, took pictures on the giant plastic animals in their back yard and yes, got ourselves some free ice water.

Most people assume that the Henry Ford is just a museum for cars. That's what I always thought. Instead, it is a tribute to American ingenuity, with fascinating exhibits on the history of power (steam, water, coal, electrical, what have you), flight (they have an exact replica of the Wright flyer) and much more.

The museum also has an interesting collection of American memoribilia including the chair Lincoln was sitting in when he was shot and Thomas Edison's last breath (?).

This most recent addition to the Henry Ford is the bus that Rosa Parks was riding when she refused to give up her seat to a white man, igniting the civil rights movement of the 1960's.

By the time we left, it was nearly four o'clock on Friday evening. We'd had a good month, but now, we just wanted to go home. We were tired and wanted to be out of the car and not in another hotel. We drove for twelve straight hours, through Ohio and Pennsylvania, arriving at Lauren's parents' house at 4:30 the next morning. We had made it home for Easter with time to spare.

It's so hard to believe all that we saw in so short a time. It's hard to believe that we were on the Blue Ridge Parkway four weeks before and that it was on the same trip as Monument Valley or Montana. A month was a good amount of time. It gave us the freedom to spend time in certain places and not feel rushed, yet by the end, we were happy to be done driving. Still, we both know that even a month only begins to scratch the surface of all this country has to offer.

We feel priviledged to have seen as much as we did, but we still have that yearning, that wanderlust to see more, to go to the places we had to skip and back to the places that we merely breezed through. I truly think it's a shame and a sin for anybody to live their entire life in this country and not take advantage of the opportunity to travel America's highways and see what there is to see. There is so much life, so many STYLES of life right outside our own back doors. You don't need to backpack through Europe to experience different cultures. Just throw a duffle bag, some food and a few Mad Libs into your car and start driving.

I'm happy to be home, but I always miss being on the road. I can't wait for the next time when Lauren and I put tires to tar again and go off in search of America.

Thanks for coming along.

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