Road Trip Day 1 - Dickinson, ND

A long but uneventful drive got us to a perfectly adequate Wyndham hotel right across the street from a very attractive little dinosaur and mineral museum. Not the world's largest collection of dinosaur bones, but beautifully laid out and curated, and filled in with a lot of reconstructions. I find that a lot more interesting than just a lot of wired together bones.

Big Sky Country

The northern route from Minneapolis to Portland is North Dakota, Montana Montana Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon. Montana has an 80 mph speed limit and it still takes a day and a half to drive across. Their state slogan is right on the nose.

This is probably from Theodore Roosevelt National Park, which is actually at the western edge of North Dakota, but it's the same general idea.


The Montana State Capitol in Helena is your basic massive, gorgeous gilded age capitol building, but the iconic statues are interesting. At first I made fun of the sword-wielding Civil War hero out front, but after I googled Thomas Francis Meagher I was won over, and now I can hardly wait for the inevitable mini-series about him. Irish revolutionary who escaped from Tasmanian prison colony to America where he marched off to war at the head of the Irish Brigade and  worked his way up to Brigadier General. The next thing you know he was Montana territorial governor, campaigning to make Montana a state. And then... he mysteriously tumbled off a riverboat and drowned at the age of 43. An ignominious end to a meteoric career. My mini-series will be an alternate history where he doesn't drown and is mentored by the elderly Davy Crockett (who didn't die at the Alamo) and goes on to become president.


Who are those strange people on the balcony up there, and why don't they ever move? Because they are statues, that's why. Montana's most revered politician and his adoring wife. You'll never guess who it is. Mike Mansfield, a liberal Democrat who helped LBJ pass his Great Society legislation and went on to be the longest-serving Senate Majority Leader in US history. Good old liberal Montana! And no, that is not from an alternate history.