Points of Note on a 30hr Drive

I recently went on a road trip to Wyoming, the Grand Tetons National Park, which in total is about 30 hours of driving both ways. Here's some stuff that happened.

While driving through Spokane I saw they have a Thor st, and I was like, well, maybe they don't mean THAT Thor, but they did, because it was right next to Freya st. I was picturing Viking deities sitting around Spokane looking bored.

My path took me all the way across Washington, a little over Idaho, and mostly through Montana. During the night I decided to push to the next rest stop, and in a haze of sleep I passed into Montana without noticing.The next morning when I woke up it was like being in the Misty Mountains, and it took about 50 miles for me to realize I wasn't in Idaho. 

At my first rest stop of the day as I was getting back in my car and catching up on correspondences I looked up to see a sixty year old man who looked incredibly spry trot up to a picnic table with a little roof structure over it. He leapt up and grabbed the beams of the roof and started doing chin ups.

The cows all dropped their calves a few months ago. In Montana I saw a field with one mother cow and there were five calves with her, no other adults. Four of the babies were sprawled completely on their sides unmoving in the rain, while the mom and one calf stood under a tree. I feel like they may have been dead, I wished there was a number I could call up to alert the farmer he might want to check on them.

Taylor's room was right on the corner of the dorms, and outside it was a tiny stump, and under the stump lived a little burrowing mountain creature. Several times when I came outside I'd see it whisk into its hole quick as a flash and there was no way to express why this delighted me so much.

On the drive home I was passing under an overpass and the worst thing ever happened. It seemed some birds were nesting up under it, and as I drove under something fell in front of my car. I saw a desperate flutter, and it looked like two birds were interlocked, they couldn't fly and I couldn't veer, and they thunked sickeningly into my windshield and went spinning away. I love birds, I'm always watching them, even just gulls and seagulls, and the entire rest of the trip every time I looked up to watch them flying I felt painfully guilty.

A coworker had recommended I bring a jug of water in case of engine overheat, so I brought one and left it in my trunk. As I was in the mountain passes on the way home I heard a gurgle of water on my hard right turn. I winced and had to wait for about 20 miles for a rest area to stop and check it out. The jug had cracked on the side and soaked through a newsprint sketchbook in my trunk. Funnily enough it was the same rest stop I'd hit on the first night, just barely inside Montana.

Oddly one of the least scenic portions of the trip turned out to be Washington on the way home. The way I went on the way down was further north, and full of trees and valleys and hills. Following I-90 home was mostly just barren brown hills. It got prettier the farther in I came, and at one point the highway was the perfect bisecting line. On my left was perfectly peerless green fields, so perfect they looked like the photoshopped wallpaper under the blue sky. On my right was cracked, sere, brown wasteland.