laundry and scenery

hello! i am writing to you from a lovely hotel room, booked for cheap on priceline with the help of my very sweet father. we are here because we decided, after talking to a nice woman in a cute little food co-op in grand forks, that we should veer from our route and go southwest towards yellowstone. and since it is the weekend, and it is july, and it is yellowstone, the chance of getting a campsite or a cheap motel nearby seemed slim. so we called my dad from the car, and he logged in to priceline, and now here we are with showers! and a very comfortable bed! and a beautiful view of billings, montana!

but i should back up a little bit. in marquette, michigan, we spent a lovely morning doing some laundry. i like doing laundry on the road, because it's still a routine and it feels productive (both things i like), but it is different every time because you're in a new place. this laundromat was sunny and peaceful.



while our clothes spun around in the bright orange dryer, we played a serious game of boggle. for those of you who don't know, boggle is a word game that nerdy people like us play for fun.


here is the lovely campsite where we spent the night in chippewa national forest, minnesota. sam is looking out on the lake while the rain fly airs out. we were the only people in the whole place, except for the campground host family, who came to talk to us and were very nice. we learned about the loons and bald eagles and canadian geese who live on the lake there.


sam is happy here because he finally put on a long-sleeved shirt to protect himself from the mosquitoes.


we woke up in minnesota and decided to keep driving west into north dakota. i don't have any very good pictures of the beautiful yellow and blue fields we saw there, but this one taken from the moving car might give you a little idea.


sam drove amazingly well through the very windy plains, where we saw many tumbleweeds. later we got lucky when we pulled over at a rest stop to wash some cherries and saw that we were actually on the edge of the theodore roosevelt national park, where some badlands are. we got to wash our cherries and see some beautiful scenery. it was still very windy.



tomorrow we're planning to get a little closer to yellowstone. maybe we'll get lucky and find a campsite, but if not, we'll wait for the weekend campers to go home and then try to get a spot on sunday. our friends ben and meredith told us that yellowstone was one of the best parts of the road trip they took, so we are very excited about our new route.

we love and miss you all and will write again soon.