H’okay, time to go to Yellowstone. Here are the daily pics of the drive:

Clearly ZZ-Top was on Top of his game en route to Yellowstone. To be completely frank, the ride was pretty boring and simple. It was a lot of watching the crew race each other via rubik’s cube, cause we’re that fucking cool. Much of the excitement occurred in the realm of gas stations, as always. In my previous post I talked a bit about how South Dakota has been stepping up its gas station game. Well, I think it may have met its match. Montana has been eyeing the pride and prize of having the greatest gas stations in the nation for a long time, and its really starting to show. Upon our stop in Montana, I found adjacent to the gas pumps something so much more spectacular than stuffed animal carcasses. Check it out:

Yeah. Montana is sporting a casino directly attached to the gas station. I just feel blessed to live in this country. Pumping gas is so boring. Montana recognizes this and believes that even vehicle maintenance should be a party. This is why Montana is widely regarded as the rage capital of the Northwest. After that we stumbled into a gas station in Billings, MT and a s’mores kit caught my eye. What a great way to bond with your fellow brethren and also eat chocolate. The mission was simple: pick up the chocolate, bring it to the cashier, pay the cashier an agreed upon amount of currency for said chocolate, and depart the gas station. But as most missions are concerned, things rarely go according to plan. The cashier was so perplexed by the pack of Hershey’s bars I gave him that he had to call headquarters for 25 minutes to figure out what was going on. I can only imagine the intensity and urgency the executive at headquarters must have felt as he raced to sort out this Hershey crisis. As the line halted and grew upon itself, people began talking and we made the acquaintance of two girls who were also headed to Yellowstone.  A Dutch girl by the name of Emmelyn and a German named Eva. The Dutch girl looked so Dutch and the German girl looked incredibly German. They were in Wyoming for six weeks to train horses, clearly a step-up from the boring European life. Our respective groups exchanged numbers to meet up and go hiking or look at rocks or whatever it is you do in Yellowstone. Probably the only time you can receive 11 digits and not be concerned. Eventually we succeeded in procuring the s’mores and we were our way. The drive into Yellowstone was fairly smooth. All jokes aside, the place is beautiful. Stupid beautiful.

The campground where we wanted to sleep was all full so we made due with another one called “Fishing Village”. No grills available and only 2 showers were allowed between the 6 of us per night in the facilities. So while Dave was cooking burgers on the stovetop, the rest of us performed a Hunger Games-esque ritual outside to determine who may shower. Dave was exempt because clearly he would just eat us if we tried fighting him. You can try guessing who won the Hunger Games but its not who you would expect. Unless you expected the martial arts expert “Brickface Hitmanlee” to win. Anyway, the six of us spent the night getting plastered in the RV on Steel Reserve, of course. We also shot a text out to Emmelyn inviting them to look at nature with us tomorrow. She responded, only time would tell whether we would ever actually see these foreigners again. As we pondered the uncertain future, GameMaster Roach led the group in activities he learned in boy scouts and ASB. We played Mao, a card game where the rules are unknown to all the players except for one. Everyone picked up on what was going on fairly quickly except for drunk Dave. Chemical Engineering never fully prepared him for the complexities of Mao. As Dave became increasingly frustrated and cursed out Roach, the stars twinkled, the moon winked, and we gradually lulled to sleep with plans to battle a Grizzly Bear in the morning and see some dope ass geysers.