Ok, here's a brief account of the rest of the trip. At least as far as I can remember it.

Monday

The next morning I wanted to stop and see the town of Deadwood. This really is only because I'd recently become hooked on the HBO show Deadwood. But either way I was really interested in checking it out. We left the truck at the hotel and drove the 14 miles to the town.

Before we left I had talked to Rick (Shelley's dad) about my hope that we would have the time to stop in Deadwood. He mentioned that the town had become riddled with casinos. This became pretty obvious as we entered the town. Casinos were everywhere. We stopped at a restaurant which was connected to a hotel, and of course a casino, for breakfast. We were a few minutes into our meal when some lady in another booth won $1000 in some drawing that was being done amongst the booths. I was starting to get worried about how much the city had changed by the new focus on casinos. My concerns were unfounded, however. It's true there are an annoying amount of casinos crammed throughout the main areas of Deadwood, but the main street and a lot of the buildings remain largely as they were over a hundred years ago. It's really cool. You can get a great sense of what life was like back then. For such small town they were actually pretty technologically progressive. They had telegraph and telephone lines installed even before some larger cities in the east.

We made our way through town and then up into the cemetary. We paid the $1 admission fee and walked around looking at some of the graves. Wild Bill Hickock is buried there, as is Calamity Jane, and Seth Bullock.

Walking around the cemetary took longer than I thought it would so we didn't have any extra time to look around. We drove back the the U-haul and after gassing up, got back on the highway. I popped in my second book on tape...

From Deadwood we made it all the way to Bozeman, Montana before we stopped for the night. Nothing really to note here. The only thing that was of any interest is that there was this homeless lady hanging around the hotel before we checked in. I didn't know she was homeless right away. At first I thought she was just waiting for someone. The tip off that she was in fact homeless was when she bent down and picked up a cigarette that someone had taken only a couple drags off of and then tossed on the ground.

Tuesday

Tuesday we got up and went to have the complimentary breakfast. We were sitting down reading the paper when Shelley noticed a familiar face. The homeless lady from the night before was hanging out in the breakfast area. I thought, well of course. What an ingenious idea. If you were homeless all you had to do was hang around the hotels. You could probably get in unnoticed for a while and get free breakfast. However, you'd have to cycle the hotels so you wouldn't get noticed too often. Anyway, we finished breakfast and I went up to the desk clerk and asked about any larger bookstores in the area.

I needed another book on tape. From Deadwood to Bozeman I'd been switching between two books. One of the readers was a low talker and I could barely understand what he was saying. Instead of helping me stay awake this book made me sleepy. The guy was just so boring. I should add that the U-haul only had a radio. No tape deck or cd player, so I had to buy some speakers for my portable cd player. For the low-talker I had to hold one of the speakers up to my ear just so I could hear him half the time. The other guy was just annoying, because he used the same voices for a lot of the different characters and the voice he adopted for the lead character was really whiny and annoying. It was like this was the first time he read the book and each new character caught him by surprise. Sometimes he would mix-up which voice to use for each character.

The hotel clerk directed us to a local borders. After I picked out another couple books we drove back to the U-haul and got back on the road.

The rest of the day we just drove and drove, stopping for gas every couple hundred miles or so. The country side was very beautiful. The only drawback was that some times we would hit a steep incline and I would have to slow way down. For the most part, however, the drive was really relaxing. There weren't very many cars on the road. The weather had progressively gotten cooler as we drove west. We made it all the way to Idaho Falls where we stopped for a late lunch. We were only 4 hours away! After lunch we drove another 2 hours to Twin Falls. We found a hotel and stopped for the night.

Wednesday

The next morning we got up early and got back on the road. Two hours later we entered Boise. We were here a couple hours before our appointment to sign the lease so we decided to check out our apartment complex.......(I'll finish this later tonight, gotta go run an errand)