Our plan was to spend the night in Billings, Montana and on the way there we stopped at the site of the Battle of Little Bighorn.

On this hill Custer and his men fought against the indians but lost and were killed.  There is no way to know how authentic the placements are, but one thing that is neat about the monument is they have gravestones placed where Cavalry soldiers fell.  This gives the place more emotion.  I was expecting to find just a hill, and a hill indistiguishable from nearby hills would have had much less impact.

Deadwood is a neat old town that was incorporated in 1876 following the discovery of gold in the area.  Many of the old buildings still line Main Street and newer buildings are built to fit in, so it really feels like a step back in time.

Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane are both buried in Deadwood so our first stop was the cemetery where they lie.

After visiting the graves we went down to Main Street to have lunch.  I asked the parking garage guy for a restaurant recommendation and he suggested we go to the Midnight Star, owned by Kevin Costner.  The Kevin Costner thing kind of went right by me until we got into the restaurant.  The walls are covered with photos from his films as well as cases housing customes worn in the films.  There were customes from The Untouchables, Robin Hood, Dances with Wolves, and many many more.  We joked that there probably wasn’t a display for Waterworld, but our waiter told us that there was.  But we didn’t seek it out.

Lunch was good and we hit the road.  Deadwood was a neat old town, some day we’ll have to come back and tour around some more.

On the way north through Wyoming we stopped to see some artifacts from the migration west in the late 1800s.  Just outside the town of Guernsey, Wyoming the Oregon Trail once passed, and as the wagons drove across the sandstone ground their wheels cut ruts into the rock that are still quite visible today.

It is simply unimaginable the hardships faced by the early settlers.  As Sarah Michael and I walked along the trail I told her how easy our lives are compared to the olden-days cowboys who came across with their wagons.  I know she couldn’t fully comprehend what I was telling her, but it was cute when I told her that they didn’t have all that we have today, including TVs.  She replied that she thought maybe they had old fashioned radios.

A couple miles from the park established around the wagon ruts is Register Cliff.  Into the rock face settlers carved their names and the year of their travel.  Some very old inscriptions can still be found, but the wall is mostly filled in by modern visitors’ carving and scratching.

Just a little while earlier SM and I were walking between the Oregon Trail ruts discussing how rude it was of previous park visitors to engrave their names or initials into the rock between the ruts.  Vandalism like that diminishes the experience for those who come later.  Now here we are visiting a monument to exactly the same kind of vandalism, but it is historical and therefore acceptable.

Next we stopped to visit the historic Fort Laramie.  Jessie was excited to tour these grounds, she said she had learned a lot about this very place in school.  If I did, I don’t remember anything about it.

The park service has done a wonderful job restoring some of the buildings and you can walk in some of the buildings and look into some of the rooms that are done up like they would have been 150 years ago.  Glass prevents you from entering the rooms, but you can look in.  It is really cool.

Other structures are in ruins, but the way they stand juxtaposed against the restored buildings reminds you that this place is quite old while still giving a sense of what it might have been like long ago.

The sub is the USS Pampanito which served during World War II.  Sarah Michael was quite anxious to see it, and wanted to go inside– until she got inside.  We climbed the ladder down into the aft torpedo room to begin the tour and she seemed fine, but once we had to walk through one of the narrow doorways to visit the rest of the ship, she grew scared.  We finally convinced her to go on, but she still wanted to get out.  Every time we’d enter a new room she would pull on my arm and say “Let’s go!!”

It was a fun unexpected tour to take, though Jessie and I would have liked to have spent more time taking it in.

[See post to watch QuickTime movie]

We went to the beach and walked down to Haystack Rock.  The beach of Cannon Beach is always fun to walk on and since the tide was out we got to look at beautiful starfish in the tide pools.  I took several pictures of some of the life attached to the rocks, so be sure to see our pics up at Flickr.

[See post to watch QuickTime movie]

Unfortunately as we we were starting south down 101 out of Cannon Beach we had a bit of a mishap.  Sarah Michael was sitting behind the passenger seat in the chair beneath where I have the wireless internet router gear setup when I took one of the windy turns a little too fast and all the stuff fell down right onto SM’s head!  She started bawling and we quickly pulled over to fix her up and better-secure the equipment.  Later we got some velcro from Fred Meyer to hold things down and that worked well the rest of the day.

In Tillamook we stopped at the Tillamook Air Museum which is cool.  It is housed in an old Navy hangar that was built during WWII for K-class airships- blimps.  The building is enormous and is impressive to stand inside.  They have many different aircraft there including an F-14 Tomcat and a Mini Guppy.  This was really a fun place to visit.

Traveling even on the windy roads was fine, I really like driving.  Our jobs today were that I drove, Jessie passengered and Sarah Michael alternated between playing and singing along with her iPod.  She loves the songs she learned at Vacation Bible School a couple weeks ago and so we loaded the CD onto the iPod. Jessie and I got quite a laugh out of hearing her mis-sing the God of Wonders song, instead of singing “You are Holy” she would belt out “You are Hoe-y”.

When it was dinner time we were driving through Newport, so we decided to find a place to eat.  We parked the RV and drove the Jeep down to the historic bayfront area to find some seafood.  Parking was a bit of a problem, we saw lots and lots of restaurants, with lots and lots of cars filling every spot.  So we kept driving until we were nearly at the end of the strip when parking started coming available.  At that same time we spied a restaurant called Local Ocean Seafoods that had that level of busy-ness that suggested we were at the right place.  Jessie and SM shared some crab, I had fish tacos.  The food was great.

More driving after dinner and then we finally we ended up in our new location.  We’ll reveal all tomorrow.