I finally finished writing the blog about our 2009 cruise around the world.  As I had said when I started that one, I plan to write a blog about some of our other travel adventures as well.  We have done a lot of traveling since we retired in 2007 and I did not know about blog writing until we drove across Canada in 2014.  That was my first effort.  Before that time I just posted pictures to a photo sharing site for family members to look at.  I am hoping, over time, to write about many of those other trips and adventures beginning with our 2009 World Cruise (done) and working my way through to 2014.  (All the blogs I have written thus far can be found on this site under Hanna Travels.)

In the winter of 2010 we spent the month of January on the Big Island of Hawai’i and the month of February on Kaua’i.  We toured both of the islands extensively, interspersed with days of doing nothing.  But, much as I love Hawai’i, I am not going to write a blog about that trip.  I may change my mind later, but for now I am just going to leave that holiday in the photo files.

This blog will be about the road trip we took in August of 2010.  I do not guarantee I will will remember tons of information about where we went and what we saw – it is, after all, almost 7 years since we took the trip – but I will do my best to put some sort of narrative amidst the photographs; of which there will be plenty due to my love of taking pictures – and we saw many, many things to capture through my lens.

I have always wanted to go to Yellowstone National Park so we reserved a few days at a hotel and set off from home with plenty of time to putter our way there and plans to go elsewhere later.  We ended up spending over three weeks checking out sites in Montana, Wyoming, and South Dakota before we got back home. We packed up my Chevrolet SSR that I call Poppy and headed out the driveway on August 12.  We spent our first night in Nelson, BC; a town we like in Southern BC that is not too far from the Canada/USA border.  The next night we spent in Whitefish, Montana.  We have also been here before using some of our time-share weeks which means we have hiked around a bit and lazed around a lot more.  This day, however we took the ski-lift to the top of Big Mountain to get a bird’s eye view of the area. Everything was a lovely spring-like green due to the higher elevation and many of the alpine wild flowers were in bloom. We spent quite awhile up top wandering around and checking out the different views. In the summer, Big Mountain is a popular mountain bike locale.  To help increase year-round revenue many ski resorts have opened trails for bikes and hikers.  Whistler Resort in BC is almost as busy all summer now as it is in the winter ski season.  There were several bikers riding the trails as we took the lift back down.As we were eating our dinner at the restaurant in Whitefish, our server stopped by the table and asked if we would like to go to the Theatre.  Someone had two tickets they could not use to the 8 pm performance of the Alpine Theatre’s presentation of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s A Grand Night for Singing.  We were welcome to have them free of charge if we would like them.  Yes we would.  We made our way to the theatre after dinner and thoroughly enjoyed the show.  Thank you strangers for a lovely evening.

Our first two days were relatively relaxing drives.  We never leave our hotel at the crack of dawn – usually about 10 am – and we generally are checked in to the next place by 5 or 6.  Road trips are about seeing the sights and traveling the roads-less-traveled.

The next day we drove the Going-To-The-Sun Road (aka Logan Pass), which John has done on his motorcycle but I had not driven before.