We are at a combination weigh station, rest area, and visitor center, adjacent to the Powder River in Broadus, Montana (map). It was a fairly short drive yesterday, owing to something of a late start on account of how nice it was at the last stop, and the fact that we also stopped at the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, east of Crow Agency.
The monument is a rather solemn place, and we arrived just in time to listen to the 3pm ranger talk describing the battle. The Park Service has come a long way since the monument was established in the 40s as the Custer Battlefield National Monument, and our ranger was a Crow. She delivered a well-balanced presentation, and the Native American elements added to the memorial starting in the 90s, including the red granite markers where warriors fell, make for a much less one-sided view of this sad chapter in American history.
We ended up spending more time there than we had planned, and it was past 4pm by the time we turned back onto US-212 east. I still wanted to make some progress, and so we stayed on the road till past 6, making this rest area, while not the most pleasant location, our most expeditious option. The scales remained in operation all night, but US-212 is pretty quiet after dark, and we had a pleasant and mostly undisturbed night.
Today we will continue on to Belle Fourche, where we will turn south on South Dakota 34 to Sturgis. After Sturgis we will either continue east to Pierre, or else southeast to the Badlands by way of Rapid City. Now that we've come this far, we have it in our minds to arrive in our new home town of Madison by Monday, so that we have a whole week ahead of us to take care of all the business of moving our lives here.
Photo by rscottjones, used under a Creative Commons license.
This may seem like a rather odd question, but how was the parking at Little Bighorn? I ask because my Dad did some work as a consultant for them last year on how to improve their parking situation, particularly in regards to oversize vehicles.
ReplyDeleteSorry I dropped the ball on answering this: Your dad did a great job. Flow through the parking area was smooth and there was plenty of access for oversize vehicles. No amount of design, apparently, can keep idiots in passenger cars from using the oversize spaces, and we did see one.
DeleteWell it 'looks' like we both live in Madison now. When we were shopping for a mail forwarding service I sent an email to all the SD services to find out about their business plan in the event of the demise of the owner. I did this due to both your situation a few years ago and then the same sort of thing happened to Nick and Terry Russell. I found out that Mydakotaaddress was the only one not ran but the owner but and employee.
ReplyDeleteI believe you will enjoy working with Teri. She has done vehicle title work for us on 2 new to us vehicles one being Liberty our Silver Eagle bus the other is our PT conv. She is always a very pleasant peopson to talk to when we have the need to actually talk about something with her. Always has the answer we needed. we are #1600.
We love working with Teri. Yes, we've had a couple little glitches, but she always snaps to action to make it right. And she's super friendly, enjoyed meeting her in person when we stopped in many years ago. - #614
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