The Ride started out as an alternative to a summer camp for Rangel. The idea was for her and I to spend a couple weeks traveling. Eventually she latched on to the idea that we weren’t going to decide what to do until we got in the car. Looking back, it is hard to believe ourselves that no part of the trip was planned more than 48 hours in advance. That does not mean that Rangel didn’t have some definite ideas of what she wanted to do. Mt. Rushmore, jet skiing, horseback riding and river rafting come to mind.
We wound up spending 16 days on the road. Nine nights in the Beast, three nights at Auntie Ne’s beachhouse and four nights in hotels. The end of our rafting trip in Yellowstone on Friday Jul 27th marked the halfway point of our ride. In one week we traveled about 2112.5 miles (2036 on road, 42 off road, 18 rafting, 10 biking, 4.5 hiking and 2 ice-skating). In the second week we logged another 2000 miles in on the road and 13 on the bike before we finished. Over 4,000 miles in two weeks.
We lost track of our total animal count, but we saw hundreds of bison, many squirrels and chipmunks, sixteen geese, fourteen deer, eleven elk, four turtles, four bighorn sheep, four black bears, three dolphin, three otters, two snakes, one wolf and one grizzly bear. What makes this amazing was we saw most of these animals in a three day period in Yellowstone.