We left Jackson very begrudgingly and headed on our way through the mid west. Montana has stunning big red mountains towering all over the place and is littered with little “wild-west” style towns with cowboy hat wearing ute driving old men. We were hoping to get to Denver to stay the night with a friend of Ash’s, but the road was closed because of the snow storm so we had to backtrack a little and headed towards Casper. A token tour snowfight is had somewhere on the road there.
It’s the most bizarre landscape, as I described earlier…you keep flipping from driving through snow to driving through the desert, it gets really confusing. We had our closest encounter with Deer today as we had to brake suddenly on the interstate when 5 deer ran right across the road infront of us…I managed to snap a photo as they run off…
We get to Casper and decide to head as far east as we can that night, but just 2 mins after leaving Casper our muffler starts chugging like a boy racers and we lose engine compression and start slowly creeping along. Getting flashbacks of the 1000’s of dollars of repairs my old Low Hum tour van cost I instantly prepared myself for the worst. Typically it happened at 6:05pm and everywhere had just closed so we had to find some accom and settle in for the night. I am consoled by telling myself over and over again that at least we didn’t pull a ruby suns and have our van catch fire and burn everything. We go to 5 motels to find the cheapest one which was a really awesomely tacky 80s place designed to look like a Missisippi Steamboat, called The Show Boat. Being cheap we book just 2 beds for the four of us, a dude waiting in the lobby comes up to Ash and says “We could tell you were from New Zealand cause you guys look funny. How do you get into those pants? Does everyone in New Zealand wear pants that tight? Only people in San Fran wear pants that tight. You’re not fags are ya?”
They had free hot drinks so we forgave them.
We entered the room to the most overwhelming bleach fumes and almost fainted. We had to open the windows and leave for 30 minutes.
After getting back and flipping through cable channels for about 3 hours and not actually watching a single thing for more then 3 minutes we go to sleep. After we had all been asleep for around 30 minutes I talk in my sleep and ask Nik for the TV remote, the guys laugh at me for ages.