August 1983: From Calgary to Memphis

Although I wasn't happy about my Dad's decision that my mother and I should return to Bartlett and enroll me in school there rather than in Canada, he decided to drive us, and the trip was rather epic in its own right. We headed south from Calgary on August 16th, passing through towns like Cochrane and Fort McLeod before we crossed into Montana. Some towns, like Babb, were nothing more than one store and gas station, which also housed the post office, while others, like Browning on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, were significant. In the late afternoon, we came to a strange town indeed, called Choteau, Montana. Not only did it have the courthouse in the town square so typical of Southern towns, but it also had a dairy bar called the Rebel Drive-In, where we stopped for ice cream. But the town was largely empty and deserted on the late summer afternoon. (I later learned that Choteau had been founded by Mississippians who fled to Montana during Reconstruction after the Civil War). By sunset, we were in the state capital of Helena, Montana, which was a remarkably small town to be a capital. However, the Montana State Capitol was visible from nearly any spot in town, and had a strangely Moorish look. We ended up driving to it, and the view of it in the moonlight was worth the detour. Ultimately, we spent the night at a hotel in Bozeman. The next day, we headed south past Big Sky and Gardiner, Montana and across into Yellowstone National Park. After a brief stop at Mammoth Hot Springs, we drove around to Old Faithful, but found that Old Faithful wasn't particularly faithful, as it failed to erupt on the hour as scheduled, and actually erupted about 20 minutes late! Still, we got to see it, and then we drove on past Yellowstone Lake, before we left the park. That adventure took a large part of the day, and we spent the bulk of the rest of it driving across Wyoming. Although we passed through Jackson Hole, we didn't stop there, and we ended up checking into a motel in Gillette, Wyoming. On the next day, August 18th, we passed through Casper, Wyoming, stopping to meet with some relatives of a member of our church in Bartlett, and then headed south into Colorado. We stopped at a diner in Denver, and then headed due East along I-70 into Kansas. Somewhere in the state of Kansas, we stopped for a hamburger that was absolutely amazing, but I can't recall what town we were in, or the name of the place. We drove clean across Kansas and Missouri to St. Louis, and then due south into Memphis without stopping. It was an amazing and exhausting journey indeed.