Day Four: Traveling from Bismarck, ND to Great Falls, MT

This might possibly be the longest day for us, ever! We woke up early, 4:30 AM (Central time) to go “drop in” at a local CrossFit to work out.  Daniel, Annessa, Logan, Amelia and myself attended the 5AM class at CrossFit Tertiary.  It was a little intimidating because it was so much bigger than we are used to.  But the folks there were nice enough to us.  Though they probably had a few good laughs to themselves after we left.  

After getting good showers and breakfast back at our hotel, we started out on our day.  Daniel noticed a nail in our tire so we decided to get that fixed before traveling too far.  This we had about an hour layover in a really nice Walmart in town. 

About 2 hours down the road, we came into Medora, North Dakota to the Theodore Roosevelt’s National Park.  We first pulled over to view the Painted Canyon and get some souvenirs at the Visitor Center there. The young man working at the cash register was a student from the University of Alabama (Roll Tide). We also found a picnic table to have lunch with a spectacular view.  Pictures just cannot do it justice.  It was so beautiful and it was almost as if you had to stand there and let your eyes adjust to it. The kids kept joking that it was merely a green screen.  It was hard to believe it was really real.  

After lunch, we stopped into the visitor center outside of the South Unit. Here they had a small museum on Teddy Roosevelt, which was pretty interesting. We drove through the loop on the Scenic Drive where saw one Buffalo and several prairie dogs!

Then we continued our drive.  We had 6.5 hours left to drive to get us closer to our Glacier NP destination!!  It was a long drive, even though the speed limit was 80 mph!  Lots of the same scenery on both sides of us.  Then we lost our pavement for a while. Crazy stuff. It was a tough drive on everyone but we finally made it to our hotel around 9:30 PM (mountain time). So basically, our day had 18 hours in it!  Those hotel beds never felt so good!!