Day 2: Great Places, Great Faces

Today, we saw a ton!  We drove all the way across South Dakota, Wyoming and about 100 miles into Montana.
We started off in Sioux Falls, SD at about 6am.  We hadn't gone far, when we started seeing signs for "The World's Only Corn Palace".  Of course, we had to stop:

 Then, we stopped at Wall Drug, which is like South of the Border, only in South Dakota.

Yes, that's Aaron on a giant jackalope.

Next, we went to Mt. Rushmore.  The drive was beautiful!  We didn't walk any of the trails, but the views were spectacular!

part of the drive to and from Mt. Rushmore

The rest of South Dakota was pretty neat.  We drove past Sundance, WY (where the "Kid" got his name....not the home of the Sundance Film Festival and Robert Redford).  Here are some landscape pics:

This was at a gas station somewhere in Wyoming!

And, before I-90 turned north, we saw the Rocky Mountains from the road.  You could see snow on the peaks (if you look close enough!):

Tomorrow, we're off to Great Falls, MT to ride the flowrider! 

Day 1: The haul to Sioux Falls

We left yesterday (Friday) afternoon around 4:30 and drove until about 2:30 Saturday morning.  We stopped at a rest stop in Indiana to catch a few hours of shut eye and were on the road again around 5.  We missed (!) Chicago traffic, but did get close enough to the Sears Tower for Aaron to get a couple shots:

 

We made it through the rest of Illinois and Wisconsin, trading off driving every 200 or so miles.  We were about 150 miles into Minnesota, when we came to the town of Blue Earth, where we saw a 60 foot tall Jolly Green Giant statue (and museum):

Of course, I had to get my picture taken in front of it!  Aaron was content to just look at the JGG, he didn't want his picture taken.

We noticed driving through western Minnesota that there were a lot of wind turbine farms.  If you've never seen one, these things are HUGE!  Bigger than a grain silo!  So, I tried to get some pictures from the road:

We finally made it to Sioux Falls, SD for the night after 24 hours of being on the road.  Tomorrow, we plan to drive to Mt. Rushmore and on to Billings, MT for the night.

Calling us

To conserve battery life, we're only going to have one phone on at a time. If you are calling or texting one of us, and it goes straight to voicemail or (in the case of a text) we don't answer within a reasonable amount of time (20 minutes), try calling the other cell phone. If you don't have the other number, don't worry about it, we'll respond eventually.

Our epic trip needs an epic playlist

As we're driving cross-country, we need some awesome music to keep us going.  We would appreciate suggestions.  However, this may be a harder task than you think we we have very different music tastes.  For example:
Aaron likes: rock, (such as Foo Fighters and Linkin Park).  He hates most rap, pop, screamer rock, and country.
Amanda likes: oldies, rock (such as Tom Petty, CCR, Aerosmith, Bon Jovi), pop (but mainly that featured on Glee).

The only music we can agree on are 80's and 90's songs (either original or remakes). 

And thats where you come in.  We need songs to keep us going.  Please leave a comment with a suggestion or, if you usually contact us some other way (facebook, twitter, email), then you can do that, too!

I'll post later what our final playlist is.

Thanks!

Countdown

One more week until we leave! Aaron is working until 3:30, so we should be on the road by 4!

Our plan is for Amanda to stay up as late as she can on Thursday (and if you know Amanda, this is not going to be easy), sleep all day Friday and drive the first leg to let Aaron sleep. He will take over when she gets tired and will continue to trade off driving until we get to Sioux Falls, SD.

Our Google Map

View Our epic crosscountry trip in a larger map