On our final day in the Rapid City area we drove to the nearby (well, about 1hr 20) ‘Wind Cave National Park’. As the name suggests, this is primarily a large cave complex which you can tour, designated a National Park area with various hikes up on the surface as well. We were a little worried about being able to get tickets to the cave tours as apparently they sell out very quickly after the visitor centre opens at 8am,…
After a couple of days in Billings, Montana we moved on to our penultimate stop in a town called Rapid City. This marks our move into our fifth US state of the trip as well, South Dakota. It was a long drive to get there but we made a stop on the way at the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. This marks the site of the Battle of the Little Bighorn “on June 25–26, 1876, where a combined force of…
After our day at Big Sky which was outside of the Yellowstone NP, we returned to the National Park itself for our last 2 days in the area. We were concerned about the weather as it was forecast to be rainy a lot over the weekend, but actually it turned out pretty nice, and we didn’t get soaked like we had on our first day there! It was cooler, but mostly clear and even sunny in spells. Yellowstone Day 2…
On our second day in Grand Teton National Park we went to do some more hiking and started at a place Lucy was particularly keen to visit – Taggart Lake. It was a total 7.5 mile hike as we went on past Taggart Lake itself (photos above) to a second lake called Bradley Lake (photos below). There’s loads of these little forest rodents, which are either Golden-mantled Ground Squirrels or Least Chipmunks according to our guide, which always scurry around,…
On our third day in the Rocky Mountains we went back in to the park to do another hike, this time a steep uphill climb called Deer Mountain, around 6.4 miles there and back and about 1400 ft elevation gain to reach the peak at about 10,000 ft. We headed out early so we could get the walk done before it was busy and to get back home for lunch if possible. We didn’t pass many other hikers on route…
After a long travel day on Monday we finally arrived in the US, flying from Heathrow to Denver airport which took around 9 hours – looks like we just missed the chaos with air traffic control and loads of flight cancellations on Tue and Wed this week across the UK, so we were lucky! When we landed we had a pretty long drive to get to the town we’re staying in which is called Estes Park, and is right outside…
This will be the last post of our trip as we are flying home today, but here’s our personal highlights from the Eastern portion of the trip – following on from our Western highlights if you want to see those too. We had 9 stops in total and did so much, it was a bit hard to choose, but here you go. Lucy’s picks Best stop This was super tough to call as they’ve all been great, but for the…
On our final day in Quebec City we decided to rent some bikes from the Old Town area and cycle along one of the city’s many cycle paths, following the river up to some nearby water falls we had wanted to visit. It took us around an hour to cycle to Montmorency Falls on a pretty hot afternoon, but it was a pretty flat route and a good way to get around. The falls themselves were really impressive. We didn’t…
After a few days in Moncton, we broke up the long journey to Quebec City with a couple of nights stay in a place called Grand Falls. As the name suggests there is a large waterfalls here but as we arrived quite late in the afternoon we checked in at our motel (weird to not be in an Airbnb now!) and then headed out to a local pizza place for some food, before tracking down the only brewery in town….
We’ve spent the last 3 days in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the most easterly point of our Canadian trip. We had a pretty long 4 hour drive from our previous stop in Saint John to get here, but we had 3 full days to look around the area while we were here. On the way we made a brief stop at Rockwood State Park on the way out of Saint John which was a lovely park with a large lake and…