Road Trip, Day 5 - Fri 14 Nov: Jackson Hole, WY to Butte, MT

Today mostly involved another "driving" day. The plan was to overnight in Butte in that wonderful state of Montana. According to Google maps the shortest option was over the Teton Pass. This is the 248 mile option below. 

However, Wyoming's Chain Law Level 1 was currently applicable on the pass and this entailed the following:

We neither had tire chains nor adequate snow tires, and thanks to the arrogant Alamo car rental agent that pulled a fast one on me in Denver, we also did not have an all wheel drive vehicle. So I decided to take the 'easy' option and just head straight up I-80. I usually don't like to take the major highways, as these as very rarely scenic. Given the sky conditions today, this didn't matter as we weren't going too see anything in any event today.

The snow did its thing overnight on the Rav. This is what we found in the morning:

We were sad to leave the cute Cowboy Village behind

bye bye

especially as the day basically just again had more of this in stall:

Crossing the Idaho state line about 30 miles from Jackson

Somewhere on interstate 80, around lunch time, we decided to pull into the little town of Dubois, Idaho.

Some more 'ghost signs'.

We had an interesting chat to the twentysomething waiter that served us lunch. He was very proud of the fact that he had only ONCE been out of Idaho, when he went "to Tuscon, Arizona, Sir! And before that the furthest aye have ever been was Idaho Falls. Yes Sir!"

Gotta love small town America.

After the interesting lunch consisting of a hotdog with tater tots for me, it was yet again more of this:

I-80

Everyone was sticking to the right hand lane for obvious reasons, so overtaking anything, especially a big truck, is a particularly nerve racking experience. The fact that your wife is snapping away like a Japanese tourist on steriods while asking why the car feels so unsteady when we pass a car and at the same time blocking the side view mirror, did not really help much with the colour of my deep white knuckles.

those white snow patches looked black when compared to my knuckles.

 At last. Big Sky country.

Unfortunately we couldn't see much.

I had a haircut in Butte, and spoke to the most delightful 75 year old barber, who still rides his Honda Goldwing across America with his wife on the back. What a man.