Day 16

We woke up to 42 degrees and more sunny skies. We broke out the stove and made more pancakes then took forever breaking up camp. We didn't leave until 11 which was not brilliant considering we had a long drive ahead of us!
Max, Rosie and I sat in the back so we could watch The Avengers and Chris and Emma kept an eye out for more bears in the front seat as we drove out of the park and headed towards North Dakota. The Avengers was a fun movie, but the scenery was even more amazing. We ended up on the Bear Tooth highway which is twisty and goes to over 10,000 feet. There were glaciers everywhere so we stopped to check them out and throw some snowballs at each other.

The views were amazing!

We stopped at the rest area at the top and met some overly friendly chipmunks and marmots who came right to up to us looking for food.

We realized about halfway through that we were going to end up in Red Lodge, MT where a friend of mine from Cornell, Peter Crist, and lives and owns a restaurant called Bridge Creek Backcountry Kitchen and Wine Bar (excellent story behind the name, you should go to their website for details). We hadn't thought that we weren't going to get to go through Red Lodge so we were excited to get to stop at the restaurant and see Peter and have a yummy lunch. We forgot to take a picture-very dumb! It was so great to see Peter after 20+ years and to catch up with all of the great things that he has done since we graduated. If you ever find yourself in Red Lodge make sure to stop by, say hi and have a great meal!

After our lunch we hit the Candy Emporium and then hit the road. Peter had told us that it's a 14 hour drive to Minneapolis where we planned to visit our friends Amanda and Greg (see previous post in Jackson Hole) but, because its so far, we had planned to stop for the night at a campground in North Dakota. But, for some reason, I looked at the map at about 9:30 and calculated that it was about 350 miles from where we were. Driving 80 (speed limit is 75 in North Dakota) that should take about 4 hours, right? So we thought, why not? Lets just drive there tonight. The audiobook is great and the kids are asleep so lets do it. Well, I clearly cannot do math and did not calculate what Peter said about 14 hours. We arrived at 6 am, just as Amanda's husband Greg was getting ready to go to work. We had a no gas scare in tiny Oksana, ND at 5 am but luckily, found a gas station that lets you pump gas even when they're closed. 

We said hi to Amanda and Greg and went to bed.