When we had gone to bed it was a clear night but when we woke up on day six it was miserable and pouring with rain and Jackson looked wet and bedraggled and prospects were not very promising at all.  We boarded the coach and set off south down Highway 26 which ran alongside the Snake River and then onto Highway 89 which ran through glorious mountain scenery with appropriate place names like Alpine, Etna and the Caribou National Forest.  We crossed into Idaho at a place called Geneva and at some point stopped for a mid morning break at a road side diner.

This was a great place and reminded me of the sort of establishment that you see in road movies, it was old fashioned with home baking and staff who looked as though they had dressed themselves from their Ma’s 1950s wardrobe.  The rain had stopped and the sun was coming through and the temperature was much warmer than it had been further north and it continued to get hotter the further south we drove.  We continued through Idaho before crossing into Utah and picking up the Interstate 15 which ran adjacent to the Great Salt Lake and took us into a much more built up environment as we approached our destination, Salt Lake City.

The city was founded in 1847 by a group of Mormon pioneers led by their prophet and leader, Brigham Young, who fled hostility and violence in the east  and took a wagon train west in search of a suitable new location for themselves and their religion. On arriving at Salt Lake Brigham Young is alleged to have said ‘this is the place’ after reportedly seeing the area previously in a vision.  I suspect the truth is that he was probably just a bit knackered after the gruelling journey and being thoroughly pissed off with all the travelling just thought ‘this will do!’   Only four days after arriving in the Salt Lake Valley, he designated the site for the Salt Lake Temple, intended to be the third temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, to replace those that they had abandoned in the east.  It was constructed on Temple Square, in the center of the city and took forty years to complete.

It was a lovely day now and we arrived just before lunch time and after we had unpacked and checked in to the motel we went into the city for lunch and an afternoon of sightseeing.  The city is built on a grid system with straight roads running either north-south or east-west, a bit like Milton Keynes and believe me just as confusing.  It felt strange to be in a big city after all that time spent in the open countryside and we had to go through a period of adjustment to get used to the people and the traffic.  We found a shopping mall with a restaurant plaza and selected a fast food diner and had a swift lunch before returning to the streets to visit the Mormon Temple.

The Salt Lake Temple is the centerpiece of the ten acre Temple Square in the middle of the city and we visited the site and the extensive gardens but we were unable to visit the interior because, rather like a Muslim Mosque, it is not open to non believers.  This is because it is considered sacred by the church and its members and a visitor recommendation is required before you can gain access (a bit like joining a posh golf club, I imagine).   There is a visitor centre however with a high level gallery with excellent views over Temple Square and the rest of the city.  Whilst we were there we were obliged to endure a Mormon propoganda film which was a heavy handed attempt at religious conversion.  On hand to help in case anyone was remotely interested there were sisters of the church who who urged us all to make a referral of someone we knew back home and for a laugh we selected our grandmother and our sister but disappointingly neither of them ever received a visit.

One of the curious things about the Mormons was their strange habit of having more than one wife and in the 1850s there were disputes with the Federal Government over the widespread  practice of polygamy.  A climax to the disagreement occurred in 1857 when the Government declared the area in rebellion and this resulted in the Utah War when many Mormon leaders were captured and imprisoned for violation of anti-polygamy laws.  This I find strange.  Surely they didn’t need punishment for having more than one wife, they needed treatment.  Having more than one wife is insane!  Anyway, the Mormons abandoned polygamy in 1890 when they released ‘The Manifesto’ which officially renounced the practice and this paved the way for admission of Utah to the Union in 1896, when Salt Lake City became the state capital.

Next we visited the State Capital building which is the centerpiece of a forty acre plot which also includes a Vietnam War memorial and a monument dedicated to the Mormon pioneers.  It is a spectacular building that has been used several times in films and television to represent the Federal Capital building in Washington simply because it is easier to film and looks more venerable.  The magnificent grounds feature plants, shrubs, and trees native to Utah, as well as spectacular views over the Great Salt Lake from its elevated position.  Inside, the Capital building is decorated with many paintings and sculptues of Utah’s history and heritage, including statues of Brigham Young, the first territorial governor, and Philo T. Farnsworth, a native of Utah and the inventor of television.  I know that there are many others who claim this distinction but Salt lake City and Utah are pretty adamant on this point.

After we had returned to the motel we were in need of some beer supplies so we went for a walk to find some of the amber elixir.  This wasn’t as easy as it sounds because Utah is profoundly religious and regards alcohol consumption as a sin and can only be purchased by unbelievers in specially state licensed shops and there weren’t very many of them about.  This I can’t understand, Jesus himself went around merrily turning water into wine so what is their objection I ask?  About two blocks away we found what we were looking for and feeling slightly guilty we went inside and made our purchases.  The place was strange, a bit like a sex shop in the UK with blacked out windows and customers looking furtive and secretive as they selected their favourite tipples.  I just couldn’t help thinking ‘come on guys, join the real world!’

On the way back we were followed by a group of young men and for the first and only time on the holiday we felt slightly uneasy.  Fearing an imminent mugging we quickened our pace, took serious risks crossing a main road and by the time we got back to the motel room we had broken out into a sweat and certainly needed that drink (probably two).

Later we walked out again, but not too far, and we found a Denny’s restaurant a convenient distance from the motel (i.e. shouting for help distance) and we chose from the ubiquitous U.S. diner menu.  This wasn’t as straight forward as it could have been because the waiter tried to show off and take all four orders without writing them down.  It took some considerable time to get this right and then predictably we didn’t get the correct orders anyway.  This didn’t really matter a great deal because everything tastes very much the same anyway.  After an unsatisfying meal and a long day we returned wearily to the motel for a nightcap and bed.

After a continental breakfast at the Stagecoach Inn we rejoined the coach and because it is impossible of course to do justice to Yellowstone in just one day we returned to the park to see some more. 

Yellowstone sits on top of a reservoir of molten rock about two hundred kilometres below the surface of the earth that rises here close to the surface and is the reason for all of the geysers, bubbling mud pots and hot springs that are scattered liberally around the park.  The magma chamber is about sixty kilometres across and about twelve kilometres thick so that is something to bear in mind when you are wandering about leisurely admiring the scenery. 

Luckily these super volcanoes don’t go off very often, the last time was six hundred and thirty thousand years ago, but if it did explode you would definitely want to stand well back because one thing to be sure is that nothing for thousands of miles around would survive.  Scientists estimate that Yellowstone blows every six hundred thousand years and some experts calculate the next one is well overdue! In fact most volcanologists agree that the Yellowstone Caldera has been getting more and more fidgety in recent years and the magma floor has been rising at the fastest rate since records began in 1923.

The last super volcano eruption on earth was seventy four thousand years ago in northern Sumatra and that produced an enormous blast and a long period of volcanic winter that almost destroyed the emerging human race.  It is absolutely certain that a Yellowstone explosion would be a thousand times more powerful than the Mount St. Helens eruption in 1980 and could completely obliterate the world as we know it to such an extent that we certainly wouldn’t have to worry about climate change or Saturday’s lottery result ever again.

In addition to the risk of the volcano there are other natural things that also present constant danger.  There are on average about one thousand earthquakes a year, most are too small to notice but they are always there, rock falls are a constant danger because of all of the seismic activity forever rearranging the geological furniture as it were and then there is always the chance that there may be a serious explosion that would be curtains for anyone standing close by.  Bearing all that in mind it is probably good advice therefore not to go poking around the surface with a big stick!  The last major earthquake was in 1959, volcanic explosion in 1989 and rock fall in 1999.  Perhaps best not to arrange a revisit then in 2019!

I mention all this because today we stopped off to see the most well-known and reliable geyser in the park.  Old Faithful is a popular tourist spot where the famous geyser erupts promptly every seventy minutes or so and there are grandstands arranged an appropriate distance away from the boiling steam for the visitors to sit and admire the spectacle.  An eruption can shoot anything from 3,700 to 8,400 gallons of boiling water to a height of fifty five metres and can last from one to five minutes. The average height of an eruption is forty four metres and that’s about the equivalent of about ten London double decker busses.  Previously the most famous geyser in the park was Excelsior, which used to erupt regularly to a height of a hundred metres but in 1888 it just stopped and didn’t erupt again for a hundred years.  One day Old Faithful will no doubt just stop in exactly the same way.  The biggest geyser in the park and indeed the world is the Steamboat geyser which blows to a height of one hundred and twenty metres but this spectacle is most infrequent and you really wouldn’t want to sit waiting for it because that could waste more than half of your life.

This is a busy part of the park and nearby is the Old Faithful Inn, which is a remarkable hotel constructed entirely of timber and stone and has a cathedral like interior rising to four floors with impressive balconies overlooking the log and limb lobby and public areas.  Given the amount of wood involved in the building I wasn’t at all surprised to see that smoking was forbidden in most of the interior.

After Old Faithful we walked along visitor trails and marvelled again at more mud pots and geyser holes and kept an ever vigilant eye open for bears.  This part of the park has the world’s largest concentration of geysers and five major geyser basins at West Thumb, Old Faithful, Midway, Lower and Morris and at some point on our journey we passed the site of Steamboat Geyser but didn’t stop off to wait for it.

The weather was cold and there was snow in the air and the coach driver who was keeping an eye on the forecast was obviously eager to move on because heavy falls were predicted and when this happens it can close all of the roads until the following spring.  This usually occurs about the beginning of November and as we were only a week away and wanted to be home for Christmas, it was probably very sensible to move on.  (The following day he confirmed to us that the snow had fallen and some of the roads were indeed closed).

We left the park at the south entrance that took us into the Grand Teton National Park down US highway 26.  This was a journey of about eighty five kilometres to the town of Jackson and on the way we passed the majestic snow capped Grand Teton mountains and Jackson Lake to the west of the highway.  Many inappropriate former place and topographical names in the U.S.A. have been changed by the Board of Geographic names that was established in 1890 with a mandate to make place names consistent and respectable.  They clearly overlooked the translation of the French named Grand Tetons and obviously decided that Big Tits Mountains was OK! (Bill Bryson ‘Made in America’).

Tonight we stayed at the Painted Buffalo Inn in Jackson that was close to the town’s main square with arches of shed Elk antlers and close to the shopping and restaurant areas of this busy tourist town.  We carried out the ice and alcohol double act and later went into town to look around the western tourist shops and debated whether to buy a Stetson each but we agreed that this would be an unnecessary extravagance and decided instead upon the much more sensible and inexpensive alternative of cowboy neck ties.  Later we had buffalo steaks at the famous Million Dollar Cowboy Bar, which is a cowboy restaurant with an impressive collection of western memorabilia and cowboy theme bars and then unlike Johnny Cash who threatened to have a rowdy night out in Jackson we returned sedately to the Painted Buffalo for a quiet final drink.

We got married in a fever, hotter than a pepper sprout,
We’ve been talkin’ ’bout Jackson, ever since the fire went out.
I’m goin’ to Jackson, I’m gonna mess around,
Yeah, I’m goin’ to Jackson,
Look out Jackson town.

(Johnny Cash & June Carter)

The postcard images were all originally purchased in 1995 on the Coach Trip. The Promotional leaflet images are also all 1995 originals.

There was only a one-night stay in Cody so we didn’t get too comfortable or completely unpack our bags because after breakfast this morning we were quickly back on the coach for the eighty-kilometre journey into Yellowstone Park.

Yellowstone was designated as a National Park in 1872 when President Ulysses S Grant signed a new law ordering ‘the tract of land lying near the headwaters of the Yellowstone River to be set apart as a public park’ and in so doing Yellowstone became the first National Park in the USA and indeed the world.

We entered at the picturesque east entrance and drove through an area of coniferous forest badly scarred by the fire damage of 1988, which had burned down a third of Yellowstone’s forests.  After that we climbed the Absoroka Mountains to the Sylvan Pass and then descended swiftly towards Yellowstone and the largest mountain lake in North America.  Stops to admire the voluptuous views came frequently as you might imagine and the scenery was truly breath-taking.  Next we turned north towards Tower Canyon passing on the way the sulphur cauldron and the mud volcano and stopping for a while at Canyon Village and taking the steep walk to the lookout point at Inspiration Point for great views of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River, a thousand feet below.  Next we went on to Tower junction and the high falls tumbling spectacularly one hundred and thirty feet into Tower Creek below.  Finally we drove over the Blacktail Deer Plateau and stopped for a longer time at Mammoth Hot Springs.

The park is sensationally beautiful with stately snow capped peaks, lush meadows with herds of grazing bison, rivers and tumbling streams, a magnificent sky blue lake and bounteous wildlife.

And some of this wild life can be dangerous.  As well as the really big things like bison, mousse and elk that might trample you down there is the small matter of wolves and coyotes both of which can give you a nasty nip.  But most dangerous of all of course are the bears and all around the park there are a lot of signs sensibly warning visitors to keep well away from these magnificent but unpredictable predators. 

A Grizzly Bear can reach a weight of over six hundred kilograms and stand up to two and a half metres tall when it pulls itself up on its hind legs and it is best not to startle them because this is when they get really pissed off and dangerous.  The Park advice on what to do is clear enough but I can only imagine that it is really useful if you have got Indiana Jones like nerves of steel.  So this is how it goes:

• If you stumble across a bear first you need to back away (This will probably be a bit undignified because by now, due to involuntary bowel movements, you are sure to have messed your pants!) 
• and talk to the bear in a calm voice. (Unfortunately there is no additional advice on the sort of things bears like to have a conversation about.  Might I suggest therefore as openers, the price of honey or the story of Goldilocks!)
• Keep backing away and whatever you do do not run (this is sound advice because a full grown bear can reach speeds of thirty five miles an hour and he is sure to outrun you)
• and try in any way to make yourself seem less threatening (being in a state of extreme terror with a backbone turned to jelly this shouldn’t be too difficult).
• In the unfortunate event that the bear does charge, and you are not equipped with a sidearm, (Equipped with a fire arm? For goodness sake I’m on a Travelspere coach holiday!) promptly drop to the ground stomach-first and cover your head and ears with your arms.  In this situation fighting back will almost certainly intensify and prolong the attack.  This is obvious really because humans are seriously ill equipped to fight grizzly bears and it would be foolish to attempt it. Seriously I expect that this playing dead routine might be a bit difficult to carry through with any degree of absolute confidence and, let’s face it, realistically you are probably going to end up as the three bear’s supper!

And it’s not just the bears that make this a dangerous place because there are considerable natural dangers to take into consideration.  Yellowstone is a super volcano called a caldera (which is Latin for cauldron) that are so explosive that they just burst open and blow everything away in one almighty blast of truly biblical proportions.  And this event would be so huge that it is the reason why previous eruptions have not left behind a classic volcanic mountain, like say Vesuvius or Mount Etna.  The Yellowstone caldera measures nine thousand square kilometers and the crater is almost sixty-five kilometers across, so as you can probably imagine that would have been one hell of an explosion!

The main attraction at Mammoth Hot Springs were the terraces where underground heat, water, limestone, and rock fracture combine to create multi coloured terraces created by micro-organisms and living bacteria that create beautiful shades of oranges, pinks, yellows, greens, and browns. The springs are constantly changing because as formations grow water is forced to flow in different directions and all of that creates a kaleidoscopic display.  We stayed here long enough to walk around the boiling mud pits hissing and spitting like an old steam engine and to bump into a herd of wild elk feeding on the lush autumn grass.

When it was time to leave we drove south through the Norris Geyser Basin and exited the park at the west entrance and entered the state of Montana and the small town of West Yellowstone.  The town was small and nice enough but seemed to exist exclusively for tourists stopping over after visiting the park.  It had a cosy old west feel in a modern sort of way and we visited the shops and found a convenient liquor store to replenish our supplies.  Tonight we stayed at the Stagecoach Inn which was a modern building built to a quaint design with wood panelled walls, paintings depicting the wild west, animal trophy heads and a piano in the bar that Dad had an unmelodious plonk on.  I liked this place and at the end of the fortnight was happy to declare it the best accommodation of the holiday.

The postcard images were all originally purchased in 1995 on the Coach Trip. The Promotional leaflet images are also all 1995 originals.

After another good nights sleep and a hearty breakfast we packed our bags and loaded them onto the coach because it was time to move on from Rapid City and start going west.  Today we were going to travel through some of the old wild-west towns that previously I had only seen in movies or on the TV, towns with famous names like Mule Creek, Buffalo, Custer and Sundance.  Also along the route was the unfortunately named town of Gayville but I don’t remember that featuring prominently in any John Wayne films. 

As there was a fair way to travel today the coach left early and we rejoined Interstate 90 and this time travelled northwest towards mountains and snow.  Soon we were back in the Black Hills and after a short time the coach left the Interstate and turned onto a road that ran down the side of a dry creek bed full of fallen trees washed here by flash floods towards the appropriately named town of Deadwood who amongst its famous previous citizens were Annie Oakley (I couldn’t help humming the tune to ‘The Deadwood Stage is coming on into town’) and Wild Bill Hickok.

It was the gold rush of 1874 which gave rise to the notoriously anarchic town of Deadwood, which quickly reached a population of around five thousand citizens.  With so many people needing entertainment two enterprising brothers brought a wagon train to the town in 1876 containing what were deemed to be commodities essential to the community to supply the saloons that were frequented by gamblers and whores and which proved to be a very profitable venture.  Demand was high, and the business of prostitution proved to be an especially good investment.  The hotel Madams became the richest people in town and an abundance of boisterous saloons were soon established.  The town attained famous and lasting notoriety for the murder of Wild Bill Hickok, and it became known for its wild and almost lawless reputation, during which time murder was common, and punishment for homicide not always fair or impartial.

A fire on September 26 1879 completely devastated the town, destroying over three hundred buildings and consuming everything belonging to its many inhabitants and without the opportunities of rich untapped veins of ore that had characterised the town’s early days, many of the newly impoverished left town to try their luck elsewhere and the place never quite recovered.

In the centre of the town today there is a conservation area with both original and reconstructed old west buildings including the Nuttal & Mann’s saloon where old Wild Bill was shot whilst enjoying a glass of whiskey and a game of poker on August 2^nd, 1876.  Legend has it that Hickok could not find his favourite empty seat in the corner, where he always sat in order to protect himself against sneak attacks from behind, and instead sat with his back to one door and facing another.  This was unlucky for him because this night  he was shot in the back of the head by a man called Jack McCall.  When he was shot he was holding a pair of aces and a pair of eights and ‘aces and eights’ has been known ever since as a dead mans hand!

Gambling lives on in Deadwood and in the middle of the town we visited the Midnight Star Casino which was a upmarket sort of place that is owned by Kevin Costner who bought it while he was making the film ‘Dances with Wolves’ which was filmed in the Badlands National Park.

After we were through in Deadwood we continued our drive west and soon passed the state line into Wyoming and after about fifty kilometres we passed the town of Sundance which is famous for the fact that in 1887 a man called Harry Longabaugh was convicted of horse theft in the town and was sentenced to eighteen months in the Sundance prison.  Because of this time in jail Harry became known thereafter as the Sundance Kid and later Robert Redford.

 There was a lot of snow now and after another two hundred kilometres we passed the town of Buffalo where close by is the famous Hole-in-the-Wall which is a remote hideout located in the Big Horn Mountains.  The site was used in the late 1800s by the infamous Hole in the Wall Gang, a group of cattle rustlers and other outlaws which included among its members Kid Curry, Black Jack Ketchum and Butch Cassidy.  The area was ideal for outlaws as it was remote and secluded, easily defended because of its narrow passes and impossible for lawmen to approach without the outlaws being alerted.  From the late 1860s and for about fifty years the pass was used frequently by numerous outlaw gangs and at its height it featured several cabins that gangs used to lay up during the harsh Wyoming winters, and it had a livery stable, a corral, livestock and ample supplies.

We passed teasingly close to the site of the battle of the Little Big Horn but like Sundance and Hole-in-the Wall we didn’t stop off and the coach kept relentlessly going west and it was about now that I thought it would be nice to be driving myself so I could stop off now and again whenever I choose to and not only when the schedule said so.

This was a long day on the coach and with still a considerable way to go before we reached the town of Cody all you could do was settle back in the seat and watch the glorious scenery of Wyoming flashing by the window.  Richard amused himself constantly by taking video camera footage of the journey, Dad slept and Mum chatted with the other passengers.  It was still warm but there was more and more snow on the hills now and I wondered if the weather was about to change.  Eventually, after what seemed a lifetime we arrived at our destination and another Best Western Motel.  It was here that we hit on a drinking preparation routine that we stuck with for the rest of the holiday.  It was as simple as this, while I waited at the coach for the bags to be unloaded, Richard had the far more responsible job of being the first to pick up room keys so that once checked in he could get immediately to the ice dispenser and fill the sink with its frozen contents so that we could immediately cool the alcohol in this home made refrigerator and reduce the waiting time for cool beer, this was wonderful ingenuity and an example of perfect partnership working.

Buffalo Bill Cody founded the town of Cody, Wyoming and he popularised this area as the most scenic approach to Yellowstone National Park. In appreciation of this the town has not forgotten Bill and named most of it in his memory because there is the Buffalo Bill Historic Centre, the Cody Night Rodeo, Buffalo Bill Old Trail Town and The Buffalo Bill Dam and Visitor Centre.   We spent a pleasant evening in Cody at an easily forgotten diner and we looked forward to Yellowstone Park tomorrow.

The postcard images were all originally purchased in 1995 on the Coach Trip. The Promotional leaflet images are also all 1995 originals.

We didn’t get to see the best of the Quality Inn, to enjoy the swimming pool or the bars because there simply wasn’t enough time and in the morning after our first generous American breakfast in the dining room we met our tour guide and were pretty quickly loaded back on to the bus and sped away from the city on Interstate 90 and then Highway 16 towards the famous Black Hills of Dakota. 

The Black Hills is an area that is famous for gold, Indian wars and Custer’s last stand.  After the discovery of the precious metal in the 1870s, the conflict over control of the region sparked the last major Indian War on the Great Plains of America known as the Black Hills War.  Previously the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie had confirmed Sioux ownership of the mountain range but this was conveniently overlooked by the authorities when gold was discovered and the native Americans were assigned alternative land ownership on less valuable bits of real estate in order to make way for the prospectors. 

This led to real trouble and culminated at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in the neighbouring Montana territory, where the 7^th cavalry under the command of General George Armstrong Custer took on a coalition of Native American tribes comprised of Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapahoe warriors and led by the Sioux chiefs Crazy Horse and Gall and by the Hunkpapa seer and medicine man, Sitting Bull.  The one thousand, eight hundred Indian warriors outnumbered the army troops by four to one and with superior tactics and a rightful cause as motivation won an emphatic victory and killed all of the four hundred and fifty or so US cavalry troopers and Custer himself who despite his heroic image probably committed suicide in preference to ritual mutilation.  Good option if you ask me!

Our first destination was to see the U.S. National Monument Mount Rushmore with its famous granite sculptures of Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.  The sculptured faces are sixty feet high and are as grand and enduring as the contributions of the men they represent.  Between 1927 and 1941 the sculptor Gutzon Borglum and four hundred workers created the colossal carvings to represent the first one hundred and fifty years of American history and symbolised these particular presidents who were selected for mountain side posterity because of their role in preserving the Republic and expanding its territory.  Originally the sculptures were to be carved from head to waist but this all proved to be a bit too ambitious so what we have are just the heads.  This doesn’t mean to say that they aren’t extremely impressive and we all enjoyed the visit.

Next stop was the Crazy Horse Memorial about thirteen kilometres away and a sort of alternative ethnic memorial to the great native American warrior chief.  The monument has been in progress since 1948 and is still far from completion.  The sculptor died in 1982 and if and when it is ever finished, it will be the world’s largest sculpture because the head of Crazy Horse will be a massive eighty seven feet high.  The Memorial is on the road to a place of notoriety called Wounded Knee where on December 29th 1890, the Wounded Knee Massacre occurred on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. This cowardly action is commonly cited as the last major armed conflict between the United States and the Sioux Nation and the massacre resulted in the deaths of an estimated three hundred Sioux, many of them women and children and just twenty five U.S. soldiers.  Attacking in the early morning while the Sioux were still in bed proved to be an overwhelming advantage to the U.S. troops.

Later that day in the afternoon we drove along Highway 44 close to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and through the Badlands National Park, which is a strange and beautiful landscape of deep gorges, saw-edged spires and grassy-topped buttes, an eerie world carved out of the prairies by thirty five million years of wind and water erosion and with wonderful names like ‘Buffalo Gap National Grassland’ and the ‘Sage Creek Wilderness Area’ to inspire the imagination.   The term badlands represents a historical consensus in North America, the Indians called the place ‘mako sika’ and Spanish colonists called it ‘malpaís’, both meaning literally bad land, while French trappers called it ‘les mauvaises terres à traverser’ which translates as ‘the bad lands to cross’.  The term is also topographically apt because these badlands contain steep slopes, loose dry soil, slick clay, and deep sand, all of which seriously impede travel.  Luckily we were on an interstate highway in an air conditioned coach and we found the journey rather more straight forward than the early pioneers.  After visiting the Ben Reifel Visitor Centre in the Cedar Pass we rejoined the Interstate at Cactus Flat and turned west back towards the city.

All along Interstate 90 there were hundreds of billboards advertising the Wall Drugstore and I was beginning to wonder what this was all about when we reached the town of Wall and all was revealed.  ‘The Wall’ is actually a rugged topographical strip a half mile to three miles wide and nine miles long with a succession of tinted spires, ridges and twisted gullies which separates the lower prairie from the upper and from which the name of the town of Wall, South Dakota is derived.  

This is a small settlement just off the highway that is unremarkable except for the Wall Drugstore.  This small town store made its first step towards international fame when it was purchased by a man called Ted Hustead in 1931 during the great depression.  Hustead was a deeply religious man and a pharmacist who was looking for a small town with a thriving Catholic community in which to establish a business and he discovered and purchased Wall Drug. It was located in a small town that was recently by-passed by a new main road in what he himself referred to as ‘the middle of nowhere’ and he thereafter struggled to make a living and business was very slow indeed until his wife hit upon a brilliant idea to advertise free ice water to thirsty travellers passing by on the nearby highway.  This was an immediate success and began to divert motorists off the main road to take advantage of the offer, to the extent that Wall Drug grew into an enormous cowboy themed shopping mall and even today free ice water is always available for travellers who stop by for a rest.  It’s a nice story and the place was busy but full of arcade shops with merchandise that I had no desire to purchase and it wasn’t a place that I would rush back to and I was happy to move on.

After our short stop in Wall we rejoined the Interstate and returned for a second night in Rapid City where we lost no time in finding a liquor store for essential supplies and consuming an appropriate amount before we went looking for a diner for evening meal.

The postcard images were all originally purchased in 1995 on the Coach Trip. The Promotional leaflet images are also all 1995 originals.

I visited the National Parks of the United States of America (not all of them of course) on a coach trip holiday with my parents and brother Richard in 1995.

Mum and Dad liked to travel and generously invited us to accompany them on a Travelsphere coach trip holiday to the mid-west mountain states of the USA on a journey that would start more or less at Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming and finish at the Grand Canyon in Colorado. That is the sort of invitation that his hard to turn down so we explained things to our families, packed our cowboy gear and our denims, changed some sterling for dollars and set off in search of the old Wild West.

It was a long way to go of course and as you might imagine the first day was mostly taken up with travel.  We flew from Gatwick Airport in Surrey and at the airport check-in desk we had our first embarrassing moment.  An airline official moved down the queue asking the obligatory questions including ‘did you pack the bag yourself?’ ‘Has anybody given you anything to carry through?’ The answers to which of course are YES and NO!  Mum however decided to own up on Richard’s behalf to a thoughtful gift of a bottle of gin from his children, which led to a ‘are you taking the piss’ sort of look from the airline official and the pair of us hoping that the floor would quietly open up and swallow us to spare our state of extreme embarrassment! 

The flight from England was to Minneapolis in Minnesota, which is a State about half way across the North American continent with a border to the north with Canada and to the east with Lake Superior.  Minneapolis has a Scandanavian heritage and according to the most recent United States census there are more than four and a half million Norwegian Americans and most live in the Upper Midwest and currently comprise the tenth largest American ancestry group.  In Minnesota 868,361 Minnesotans claim Norwegian ancestry, 16.5% of the population of the State.  No wonder then that in professional football the team from Minneapolis is officially named the Minnesota Vikings a name that is partly meant to reflect Minnesota’s importance as a center of Scandinavian American culture.

Minneapolis sounded like an interesting sort of place sitting adjacent to the Mississippi river surrounded by lakes and water but unfortunately we didn’t get to see any of it at all, except for the airport, because we were only landing here and waiting for a transfer further west to Rapid City in South Dakota.  The US immigration officials greeted us in their normal friendly and charming way, with a surly manner and an intimidating list of dumb questions and once we had endured the indignity of a typical US welcome we roamed the airport shops and had a first beer on American soil.  Finally we made the connection and took the short flight in a clapped out aeroplane that rattled all the way to our final destination for this leg of the journey and the starting point for our National Parks adventure.

It was late and it was dark and we were tired so we were glad when the coach dropped us off at the Quality Inn motel on North Lacrosse Street just out of the city centre.  It was too late for the bar or the whirlpool tub so we checked in and explored our adjoining rooms that were spacious, warm and comfortable.  Almost immediately the welcoming ambience was destroyed when Richard let out an almighty fart that judging by the obnoxious odour had been brewing in his intestines for some considerable time and which went right off the stink meter.  Even if I hadn’t been exhausted I would certainly have been rendered immediately unconscious by this unholy blast and I collapsed into bed and complained vociferously before falling into a deep sleep.  Some time during the night Dad woke up and being completely disorientated in the blacked out room came stumbling into ours in search of the bathroom.  He managed to get himself thoroughly tangled up in the curtains and whilst fighting for a way through successfully managed to wake us all up some time before the scheduled breakfast.

The postcard images were all originally purchased in 1995 on the Coach Trip.

To make things worse it was cold and our clothing was totally inadequate.  The crew were all wearing clothes suitable for Arctic conditions but we were still in mediterranean attire.  The only sensible thing to do was to go inside where it was warm, but once inside I just began to feel sick so had to go outside again almost immediately.  Not long into the journey it started to get dark and that made it even colder so as I couldn’t go back inside without being ill I found a lounger in a reasonably sheltered spot and tried to go to sleep. And I was very successful and when I woke I was delighted to discover that we had been at sea for three and a half hours so must be nearly home.  The boat was listing at about 30° so walking was really difficult but I got to the front of the ferry and looked for the welcoming lights of England.  To my horror there were none and when I enquired a fellow suffering passenger told me that because of the conditions the crossing was now estimated to take eight hours!

I was cold and stiff but at least I didn’t feel sick so I went inside and found Richard who like me had remained feeling well by sitting outside.  We went downstairs and it was like a scene from the battle of Trafalgar.  There were no staff on duty anywhere because they were all too ill to work and in duty free bottles of spirits clattered together on the shelves and rolled about on the floor.  It was just there for the taking but the last thing we felt like was alcohol so we moved on to the dining room where we found Tony completely unaffected by all of this mayhem and quietly enjoying a meat pie.  Well, that was it for me and as my insides turned over several times I had to find my way back outside fast.  People were lying all around, some had collapsed in the corridors and everywhere there were crew members with mops and buckets washing down the vomit.  I made it to the outside but only just before I emptied the contents of my heaving stomach over the side but a gust of wind caught most of it and blew it back only narrowly missing a group of passengers all clinging on to the railings and like me wishing for the voyage to end.

I tried to sleep some more, but it was impossible so I just sat with Richard and felt thoroughly miserable.  Tony came by several times to see if we were feeling alright but was unable to locate Anthony to check on his condition and none of us had any idea where he might be.  Eventually the south coast of England came into view but it seemed to take an eternity to get close and finally to dock in Newhaven.  We were reunited with Anthony, who it turned out had spent all eight hours of the crossing in the lavatory in his own private cubicle and we made our way to the garage deck and back to the car.

The doors of the ferry opened and being at the front we were first off and the remarkable thing was that as soon as were on solid ground and the earth was no longer moving in conflicting directions we all felt instantly better.  I was amazed that I could recover so quickly and looked forward to the last leg of the journey home.  But our problems weren’t over yet and no sooner were we off the boat than we pulled over by Her Majesty’s customs officials.  They didn’t seem pleased to see us and probably wondered just what we were doing driving this knackered old UK registered, left hand drive car back from the Continent.  Their mood didn’t improve when they enquired where we had come from and after Richard told them Portugal I added the rather superfluous detail that we had driven back through Spain and France.  They interpreted this weary response as taking the piss and asked all sorts of dumb questions about alcohol, cigarettes and smuggling in general and then told us that if he wasn’t satisfied with our responses that he could impound the vehicle.  Anthony was delighted with this piece of information and got out of the car and invited them to take it away.  Between us we calculated that it was only worth about £50 anyway so between us we could easily compensate Gordon for his loss.

Eventually I think it must have dawned on them that we had just got off the ferry from hell and they grudgingly let us pass.  But it made us think? Just why did Gordon want this old wreck back anyway?  Were the door panels packed with cocaine we wondered?  We didn’t really care that much we were just glad to be back in England but not looking forward especially to the three hour journey back to Nottingham.  We dropped the car off in Rugby and replaced it with something a bit more modern and with the luxury of a fully functioning heater completed the remainder of the journey and in the early hours of Monday morning were just so very glad to be back home and in a comfortable bed. 

It had been a very interesting week, we discovered just how tight with money Tony was, how far Anthony would stretch the truth to impress supermarket check-out girls from Leeds and how much Richard and I liked going away on holiday together.  The following year the two of us went back to the villa but thankfully this didn’t involve driving a car all the way back home and we have been away several times since but never back to Portugal.  The channel crossing put me off ferries for years and I didn’t take another crossing until nearly twenty years later, when I finally got over it in 2004 and went to France again using the Dover to Calais crossing, which wasn’t nearly so bad!

This was probably just one of the best nights sleep of my whole life and I woke fresh and raring to go and because we had caught up so much time then we weren’t nearly in so much of a rush this morning.  We had time for breakfast and then we headed north again towards the port of Dieppe in Normandy and an afternoon ferry crossing home.  Twenty-four hours previously I don’t think any one of us was that confident of making the English Channel by Sunday afternoon so this was a real bonus and we drove steadily the final three hundred kilometres first past Le Mans and then Rouen and on to Dieppe just after lunch time.

As we drove the weather continued to deteriorate and there were steel grey skies and patches of squally rain.  And it was cold, this was the end of November and we were getting closer and closer to home.  We arrived in Dieppe with plenty of time to spare, purchased our tickets for the SNCF Senlac cross channel ferry, parked the car and went into town.  Dieppe is an interesting little place but it was raining and miserable so rather than walk around the streets getting wet we found a bar instead and had a beer or two and a light lunch but didn’t eat much because our plan was to have a meal on board the ferry.

It was really cold and rather stupidly we just didn’t have any suitable clothing.  We had all packed for Portugal and southern European temperatures so we looked a bit silly in Dieppe in November in t-shirts and hopelessly inadequate little nylon jackets.  It was very very cold and we could see from the seafront that conditions in the channel were not that good so we were probably going to get a great deal colder before we got home.  It looked so bad that three of us were minded to abandon the crossing and wait until tomorrow but Tony had a private medical appointment the next day for a minor operation on his hand and as it was paid for he wouldn’t agree, so we were compelled to carry on.

So we made a plan!  We would be first on the ferry and get a good seat in the bar in the warm where we could have a drink and a meal and enjoy the crossing home and we returned to the car and made sure we got a first place on the boat.  After half an hour or so we started to drive on to the ferry and because there was a very strong wind blowing this was by no means an easy passage.  Even in the protection of the harbour the ferry was swaying dramatically from side to side and the staff had to be very careful about getting vehicles on board.  One driver in front lost his exhaust as the boat pitched at the wrong moment and metal ramp reared up and attacked the underside of the car.  Richard got us onboard safely and the green Escort was directed to a perfect place where we sure to drive of first in Newhaven.

On board we went to the bar, found a seat and ordered beers and settled in ready for the four hour crossing.  Even though we were in the harbour the boat was already pitching from side to side which made walking with a pint of beer in hand a litle bit difficult but we really had no idea what was about to happen.  A member of the crew told us that there was a force seven gale and if it reached force eight that we wouldn’t be sailing anywhere.  Wind speed is measured on the Beaufort Scale that was developed in 1805 by Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort who divided weather conditions into twelve categories for the purposes of reporting consistency.  Force seven is a near gale, force eight is a gale and so on all the way to force twelve, which is a hurricane.

The ferry cast off and now that there was nothing to hold it to the land it immediately started to roll even more dramatically.  Anthony was the first to go and without an explanation he left the lounge in an almighty rush and that was the last we saw of him for the entire journey.  Tony was perfectly alright but Richard and I felt a bit queasy so we finished our drinks and went outside where we hoped the fresh air might be beneficial.  Conditions were really bad and things didn’t look good and the ferry was finding it difficult to even get out of the harbour but when it did then matters took a turn for the worse.  Officially, according to the Beaufort Scale, in a force seven, sea heaps up and white foam from breaking waves begins to be blown in streaks along the direction of the wind.  Well, it was certainly heaping up today and spray was coming up over the sides and once outside the protective walls of the harbour the ferry started to bob about like a helpless cork.

Photograph by: Newhaven Dieppe Ferries- Paul Smith / 1985-senlac-02
paul@mainlymono.co.uk

We were so relieved to be leaving Spain that we stopped for a short while at the border on the French side and bought some doughnuts for breakfast but when we opened the sellophane packets they turned out to be past their sell by date and starting to go mouldy so they had to go straight in the bin.  Except for Anthony who declared himself so hungry that he could eat his own arm so he just nibbled carefully as close as he dared (which was alarmingly close in my opinion) around the green bits.  So much for French haute cuisine!

At last we were in France and now we did some serious non-stop driving to try and catch up time.  We were short of cash so avoided the motorways but this didn’t hold us up at all because the French N roads are of a really high standard and as this was Saturday the traffic was very light.  The sun was out now and the first stretch was through the last of the Pyrenees.  Anthony was driving and this presented the next problem.  He had very bad eyesight and wore reactalite lenses, which were fine on the open road but presented a real problem when they responded only very slowly indeed to the changed conditions when we went through tunnels cut through the mountains, and this presented a few moments of sheer panic when it would have been handy to have a change of underpants close by.

We simply didn’t stop as we drove relentlessly north.  First we passed Bordeaux, which we were delighted to discover had a by-pass and then Angouléme and then Poitiers.  This was like the Le Mans 24-hour endurance race and we kept switching drivers at regular intervals while others slept to be ready for their turn.  And as we drove north the weather deteriorated and we left the sun behind and the sky became overcast and cloudy.  We just kept going and going and going and then, when we reached the city of Tours, we could go no further so we pulled into a motel on the southern outskirts, booked in, went to our rooms and rested for a while on comfortable beds and clean linen.  It was heaven.

Next to the motel was a fast food place and the others would have been happy to eat there but I couldn’t handle the shame associated with dining in such a place when I was in France so I argued my case for something indigenous and the others finally gave in.  Somewhere just out of town we found a restaurant that looked suitably Gallic so we parked the car and went in.  It was a strange place that had only one option, which was raw beef and boiled potatoes but we were too tired to change our minds so we agreed to eat there.  The beef was being cooked over a 30-watt light bulb but the trick was to pick up a scalding plate and when the thin slices were cut and handed over the heat in the ceramic would complete the cooking process.  Actually it was delicious and we all went back for a couple of second helpings.  After our meal we sat chatting and looking back on the journey and a Rastafarian French student enquired if we had a cigarette, we said no and apologised and he tutted and shrugged his shoulders disapprovingly in that very French sort of way, threw out his arms in disgust and went to the cigarette machine to buy his own.  He went back to his table and sulked in a Charles de Gaulle sort of way and I noticed that he didn’t offer us one even though he must have known that we were non-smokers and would surely say ‘non merci’.

We had done really well today and we had driven nearly a thousand kilometres and now we were only four hours behind schedule, we had caught up a huge amount of time but now we were really, really worn out with travel fatigue so we were all glad to get back to the motel for a well earned good nights sleep.

There was still a very long way to go so we planned for another very early start.  When we woke in the morning there was no power anywhere in the hotel and we had to pack in pitch darkness so goodness knows how much stuff we left behind.  We met in the car park and then we had our first problem of the day – the car wouldn’t start!  It was wet and miserable and the electrics were damp and it was probably still trying to get over yesterday’s long drive because this journey was one of the sort of improbable things that these days Jeremy Clarkson does on ‘Top Gear’!  We couldn’t bump start it because it was an automatic so Richard, who understood how cars work,  lifted the bonnet and fiddled with the leads and poked around a bit and the rest of us , who didn’t, stood around and kicked the tyres.  We were all impressed when Richard got the poor thing going and we set off on the road for Burgos on the way to France.

Richard was driving and by the time it got light we were making good progress north along a main highway that, because it was Saturday, was not especially busy this morning.  To this day I still dispute the designation ‘motorway’ because it was single carriageway, had no emergency lane, no lights and as it happens no road markings either.  Richard was driving sensibly and only overtaking when it was safe to do so but then, after about sixty kilometres, we had our next problem.  And this was serious!

All of a sudden the interior of the car was flooded with blue flashing lights from behind and a Spanish highway patrol vehicle was pulling us over.  Richard complied and we all left the vehicle to be confronted by two Guardia Civil policemen in their olive green uniforms, black boots, leather belts and those tricorn black hats that they used to wear, getting out of their green and white patrol car and looking very serious indeed.  We weren’t absolutely sure why they had asked us to stop and when we asked for explanation one of them drew a diagram that seemed to indicate that we had overtaken on double white lines.  Double white lines!  What lines?  They may have been there twenty years ago but there were certainly none there now!  There were two of them and the older one started to write out a ticket for a fine for fifteen thousand pesetas, which was about £60 and seemed like a lot of money to us, especially bearing in mind that we didn’t have any pesetas left anyway.  Anthony was minded to argue but the younger one tapped his fingers on the holster of his pistol and readjusted his cosh in his belt and the rest of us took that as a sign that we should just shut up and pay up

.

This didn’t get over the problem of having no cash but the two highwaymen had a solution and made us follow them to a garage where they supervised the cashier as he exchanged everything that we had got into pesetas and the policemen gleefully took possession of it.  He took all of our French Francs, UK Sterling and what few Portuguese Escudos we had left, and actually we had more of those between us than we thought because Tony had been holding back on a bit of a stash concealed in the back of his wallet that he hadn’t owned up to and the rest of us were all a bit upset about that!  We had been thoroughly mugged and as we waved goodbye to the two policemen Anthony shouted a rather unpleasant accusation of dishonesty and an invitation to thoroughly enjoy our contribution to the Guardia Civil Christmas party fund, which thankfully they didn’t hear.

When we got back home I wrote to the Spanish Embassy in London to complain about this and to request a refund and although they replied and sympathised they explained that they had no authority over the police and therefore couldn’t do anything to help.  It was a nice letter though!

Richard was a bit upset about the incident and sulked for the next hour or so while we drove past Burgos and stopped at a little town at just about breakfast time and found a bank where we could get enough cash to buy some fuel to get us out of Spain.  We carried on out of Castilla y León and into the green mountains of the Basque Country, past Bilbaó and San Sebastián and then headed east towards the Pyrenees and then the last Spanish town of Irun at the border with France, which we finally reached about twenty hours behind schedule.