The First Day of the Rest of Our Vacation

We are on vacation. We are off to Iowa to visit Susan's family.

Because we have a house we are pouring money into, we cannot afford the special nice things of life like flying to a destination. We drive.

So today was a travel day. 

We used to do this drive straight through, taking four hour shifts and going for 22 hours until we reach Des Moines.

Now we take two long days. We left this morning at a little after eight and we arrived in Spearfish, South Dakota just short of eleven.

If you eliminate the one hour time change, we drove for 14 hours. If you include stopping for gas and dinner, it was probably more like 12 and a half.

Normally, we try to make it to Gillette, Wyoming...which is about an hour and a half behind us. There is some Fireworks Festival going on there and the cheapest we could get a room was $239.00. Usually, it would be about $75.00.

So we found a place in a little motel in Spearfish for $64.00 and made a reservation.

As we passed through Gillette, we were treated to what a appeared to be a spectacular Fireworks display. At first I thought it was lightning, but as we got closer, it was obviously a Fireworks Festival. The show we saw must have gone on for 45 minutes. It was lighting up the sky way before we got to Gillette and I watched it in the rear view mirror for a good ten miles outside of Gillette.

We continued on down the road for about another hour and a half towards Spearfish.

Bell's Motel closes their office at 10:00 so we made arrangements with Jackie to pay the bill over the phone and she would leave Room 137 unlocked.

I had the GPS programmed with the address which took us right to their parking lot. Once we found Room 137, which took a little doing, we were greeted with a locked door.

Since no one was around to help us, we drove down the road and found a Super 8 for $100.00. 

So our first day ends at the Super 8. We'll try to get a credit from Bell's in the morning.