Arriving in Chicago on a rainy monday morning, my first impression of the city was: "cold and expensive"- but I guess I just felt that way because I came up from the south. I left Chicago on a lovely warm thursday evening in the middle of a blues session of the "Great Performers of Illinois" at Millenium Park - with a big full moon in the sky and surrounded by all those buildings in downtown that became familiar during the past few days. In between those days I went to see the Sears-Tower and several museum when there was free entrance in the afternoon ( I really can't count all the waterlillies painted by Monet I've seen so far-he must have spend half of his life on painting waterlillies!! ) , got up to the John Hancock observatory to see Chicago at night, did some shopping at the "Magnificent Mile"/ Michigan Ave ( Fortunally one of my trousers gave way after the 20h- busride, so I had a good excuse for doing shopping! ), met up with Arlan, went to the Millenium Park over and over again to listen to music during the day...and not to forget about that funny puppet theater I've seen on Michigan Ave - cutest thing you've ever seen ( I even took some videos and put them on youtube.com) !!!!!!
I left Chicago for Rapid City. It didn't took me longer to get there then it took me from Dallas to Chicago, but traveling through South Dakota with nothing but prairie on both sides of the road for hours and hours made me finally realise how large this country is. I stayed in Rapid City for 2 nights to see Mount Rushmore, Crazy Horse Memorial, the Custer State Park ( Saw a buffallo!!), and the Black Hill National Forest. Guess what I saw in a park in Rapid City......2 pieces of the berlin wall - I guess if somebody ever decides to rebuild that wall it would'nt be that difficult, because 90 percent of it seem to be somewhere in canada and the u.s.. I went on to Bozeman/Montana on sunday evening and got here at 4 am the next morning- it was so cold that I could hardly get my jacket out of the backpack because I couldn't stop my hands from shaking. This is the closest I could get to the Yellowstone NP with public transportation - there's no public transportation from Bozeman to West Yellowstone, but there is a community bus going there twice a week- originally established for disabled people, but without a car I would almost consider myself as disabled over here. So I called the police station in West Yellowstone to make a reservation on the bus, unfortunally they told me that I have to wait till thursday, because the bus is full on tuesday, but I just called the busdriver and he told me that there's a seat for me today so I'm heading for West Yellowstone in the afternoon, in about 3 hours!!! Sometimes I still wonder how everything always works out so well!!! ( Dan, if you want to take the bus aswell, call the police station (406) 646 7600 to make a reservation or the busdriver ( 406) 640 1511 to pick you up- the bus leaves West Yellowstone somewhen in the morning and leaves Bozeman at 3 pm to head back to West Yellowstone - it's 10 bucks /one way )