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Friday, 31 July 2015 - (Chicago, Illinois) The Windy City

Behind New York City with its 8.5 million, and Los Angeles with its four million, Chicago is the third-most populous city in the US with almost three million calling it home. It's also home to the world's busiest airport (based on takeoffs and landings), and last year saw over 50 million international and domestic tourist visitors. There is no shortage of things to see, do, and experience here, but we have only two days to peak behind the Chicago curtain.				Most of the city's attractions are in and immediately around its downtown area, so we spent the bulk of our time here. We started with a quick wander through the 25-acre Millennium Park. Originally intended to celebrate the millennium, it didn't actually open until July 2004 - four years behind schedule. I'm sure at least someone lost their job over that.

One of the park's main attractions is this stainless steel sculpture, officially called Cloud Gate but most often referred to as The Bean due to its shape. The Bean is made up of 168 highly-polished panels welded together but with no visible seams. Unfortunately it gets covered in handprints from the throng of tourists touching it all day, as you can see in our reflection on the right. Speaking of which, the shot on the left was absolutely littered with tourists, but through some camera and Photoshop magic, I got rid of all but that crowd in the middle (not much I can do about them, short of calling in a bomb threat).				From there we hit the Chicago Riverwalk, a pedestrian waterfront along the Chicago River containing bars and restaurants, seating, boat rentals, and other such goodies.

Chicago sits on the southwestern shore of Lake Michigan - one of the five Great Lakes of North America, the only one located entirely within the United States, and the only one shaped like a floppy dick. The Chicago River here flows though the city and into the lake behind me. And if you have lots of money, you can live right here in one of the many apartment buildings round here, overlooking it all.

After following the Riverwalk for a while, I decided I wanted to get higher for some aerial shots. We spotted what appeared to be a public parking building on the river and proceeded to help ourselves. It turns out the building is for valet parking only, and they weren't too happy about us being up there hehe. While Kristina acted dumb and distracted them, I popped off a few shots :) By the way check out the colour of that water - very inviting, especially considering it was another hot one today. As part of a more than fifty-year-old Chicago tradition, the river is dyed green for every St. Patrick's Day.

Later on we headed over to Navy Pier, apparently Chicago's most-visited attraction. The pier stretches half a mile into Lake Michigan and contains a Ferris wheel and other carnival rides, an IMAX theatre, a couple museums, gimmicky chain restaurants, and a beer garden which we took full advantage of!
Near the pier is this little beach on the lake - just one of many. This particular one is Ohio Street Beach, and we spent the rest of the afternoon here before hunting down some dinner.
The Chicago River and Riverwalk at dusk.		These guys, photo taken by Mr Tripod and Mr Remote Control.

Saturday, 1 August 2015 - (Chicago, Illinois) Month two

The Chicago skyline, as seen from Northerly Island - a 91-acre man-made peninsular along the Lake Michigan lakefront. As nice as it looks today, Chicago was decimated by the so-called Great Chicago Fire in 1871. The exact cause of the fire was never determined, but it burned for more than a day and wiped out much of the city's central business district. The fire's spread was aided by the city's use of wood as the predominant building material, and compounded by strong winds. Later when the city's waterworks building was engulfed and destroyed, the city's water mains went dry and the city was helpless - the fire burned unchecked from building to building, block to block. 24 hours after the fire began it started to rain, but the fire was already burning itself out. After all said and done, the death toll was estimated at 300 and 33% of the city's population were left homeless.

The Willis Tower (formally the Sears Tower), standing at 1,451 feet (442m) tall. At completion in 1973, it surpassed the World Trade Center towers in New York to become the tallest building in the world, a title it held for nearly 25 years. It's now the second-tallest building in the US (behind the new One World Trade Center tower in New York), and 12th-tallest in the world.		Down the other end of town in the background is the John Hancock Center, this one standing at 1,127 feet (344m) tall. Upon its completion in 1968, it was the tallest building in the world outside of New York City hehe. The rivalry between the two cities seems fairly evident. Anyway, both buildings have observation decks open to the public, but we chose the latter for its better views despite being shorter (there comes a point when additional height becomes superfluous :)				Rather than dick about with the observation deck, we headed straight for the (overpriced) bar two more storeys up. There's less of a crowd, equally good photos opportunities, and one drink costs less than the observation deck ticket price anyway. Good tip!

The view looking south over the city centre and the Lake Michigan shore.		And the view looking north over more of the Chicago's lakeshore beaches. The one in the foreground is Oak Street Beach, and it's where we spent the rest of the day, doing nothing :)		And that was that for our two-day glimpse at Chicago. Pretty awesome place I'd have to say, and if not for the miserable winters, I could definitely see myself living here! We now start the fucking long drive west (1,500 miles / 2,400km long), eventually finishing in Yellowstone National Park in five days, but with a few random goodies in between.

Sunday, 2 August 2015 - (La Crosse, Wisconsin) Ch-ch-ch-changes
Change is inevitable, except from vending machines. I mentioned above that we're on the road for the next five days bound for Yellowstone National Park. Well upon investigating accommodation options in Yellowstone last night, I found everything is completely booked, almost for the whole month of August! There are several first-come-first-served campgrounds available but they fill up pretty quickly each day, and we don't want to be burning time and miles scrambling from one site to the next as we make our way throughout the park. So, change of plan then. We've rejigged our route and itinerary such that Yellowstone (and neighbouring Grand Teton National Park) have been moved until later in August. Our route is such that we'll be near Yellowstone again after doing Colorado and Utah and heading back up towards Canada, so it's easy enough to head there later without too much inconvenience. Lovely. So we're still making our way west, but now bound for Denver, Colorado instead.

Anyway, recognise this house? It's the house from Home Alone.		And here is it in the flesh, buried in the leafy northern suburbs of Chicago. Probably sick of tourists invading their property (which I also would have done), the owners have since erected this fence hehe. The house last sold in 2012 for a little under $1.6 million.

This is our little pit stop for tonight: La Crosse, Wisconsin. Nothing here of particular interest, except for the lookout over the city that I'm standing on, known as Grandad Bluff.

Monday, 3 August 2015 - (Sioux Falls, South Dakota) Meat

Another few hundred miles on the road today as we continue the trek west, and this pretty much sums it up as we spent all of those few hundred miles on Interstate 90 - the longest Interstate in the country at 3,000 miles and with this section described by Lonely Planet as one of the most boring hahaha!		After crossing the entire state of Minnesota we eventually entered South Dakota which we'll be exploring a little over the next couple days.
Our pit stop for tonight is the state's largest city - Sioux Falls, and right in the middle of it here is Falls Park, a small park established around the city's namesake waterfalls on the Big Sioux River. Not far from here is what looks to be a large manufacturing plant with "Morrell: Famous for Meats" painted on the side of it. Upon driving past we could literally smell meat hehe, specifically ham. Yummy.

Tuesday, 4 August 2015 - (Hill City, South Dakota) Badlands

Referred to as "The Taj Mahal of agriculture", "The all-time-ultimate roadside attraction", and "The world's only corn palace", this is the very random Corn Palace. The original palace was built in 1892 to showcase the rich soil of South Dakota, rebuilt in 1905, and rebuilt again in 1921. Close to 300,000 ears of corn are used to create these murals on the outside of the building, which are replaced and redesigned each year with a new theme, costing about $130,000 to do so.

Today the palace is a multi-purpose arena for concerts, sports events, exhibits, and other community events, with more corn murals decorating the interior.
And with that, it was back on the road to enjoy a whole lot of absolutely nothing as we continued across South Dakota.

Eventually, we took a scenic detour through this unbelievable vista - Badlands National Park! What you're looking at here is the work of erosion by wind and water, which over time has created these massive mesas, buttes, rock formations, pinnacles, spires, and valleys in soft layers of multicoloured sedimentary rock.

This part of the country gets some pretty impressive summer storms, and right on que one rolled in, put on a show, and drenched us before quickly moving on.		Although we stuck to the scenic loop road, there also are several trails throughout the 243,000-acre park for folk who don't mind slipping on loose rocks and breaking their ass.

Impressive stuff!

Way back in the day there was a lot of water in these parts, but it has long since dried up. Isn't nature amazing :)				Ooooo, colours! Tonight we're camping just outside of some other podunk town in the middle of nowhere, and have one more day of exploring the area tomorrow.

Wednesday, 5 August 2015 - (Gillette, Wyoming) Big heads

I'm sure everyone outside of America has at least seen these four heads sculpted into the side of this mountain. This is Mount Rushmore, and those four 60-foot (18m) heads are those of four former US presidents: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln. The idea of carving the likenesses of famous people into the Black Hills mountain range of South Dakota was ultimately to promote tourism. Construction began in 1927, and the individual faces were completed between 1934 and 1939.				Although the initial concept called for each president to be depicted from head to waist, lack of funding forced construction to end in 1941.

Over 450,000 tons of rock were removed to bring out the faces. 90% of it was removed with dynamite and the rest with jackhammers. Air compressors at the base of the mountain provided the power for the jackhammers. The scree of rocks from the sculpting and construction can be seen above below the faces.				Big heads :)

We spent the rest of the day in the area overlooked by Mount Rushmore, Custer State Park.		The park is famous for its wildlife, scenery, and (my favourite) its scenic drives. We started out on Iron Mountain Road which features several of these virtual loop-the-loops where the road spirals around itself - good fun to drive!

There are also several of these narrow granite tunnels which are barely wide enough to fit a car through.		Incidentally, the annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally is taking place here this week - one of the largest in the world. It's the 75th anniversary of the event and more than a million people are expected to be in attendance. With that being the case, we shared the roads with a lot of these today!

A typical roadside vista - very distracting when you've trying to drive among thousands of motorbikes hehe.

The park is home to a famous herd of over 1,500 free roaming bison, most of them along the so-called Wildlife Loop Road that passes through rolling hills harbouring many species of wildlife.		There are also a bunch of donkeys known as "Begging Burros" which have become rather famous themselves for approaching passing cars and begging for food. Once this one realised the thing in Kristina's hand (one of my camera lenses) wasn't edible, it quickly lost interest.

Further round the road we found a bison that had broken away from his chums and was feeding on the roadside. I had about two dozen Harley-Davidsons surrounding me as we all snapped away.		Inevitably, the big guy soon got pissed off with all the attention (and probably the obnoxious racket from the Harleys) and started to charge me hahaha! I snapped this right as he was about to pounce and then made a run for it hehe.		He then proceeded to take a dump. All that excitement must have gotten to him.

Our final drive through the park was along the stunning Needles Highway - another fun one to drive with its hairpin curves, tunnels, and more amazing roadside scenery!

Needles Highway is named after these high granite "needles" that characterise the area. Awesome stuff!

The highway ends (or starts, depending on which way you're going) at Sylvan Lake here, also known as the "crown jewel" of Custer State Park. Not a bad spot to sit back and chug down a drink amid the din of motorbikes. And that was that for our time in the park, and in South Dakota. We're now another 90 minutes west of here in the state of Wyoming for the night before heading to Denver, Colorado tomorrow.

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