The Last Ditch by Tom Paine

I am not sure my plans for today were among my best-laid. Anyway, agley they ganged. All started well with a pleasant two hour run through Montana to the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. I arrived just in time to join a bus tour organised by the Crow Nation, on whose reservation – though it was Sioux territory at the time – much of the battlefield now lies.

After that was done, I drove the tour route through the battlefield with the roof down in the sunshine, stopping to read the markers at each of the key sites along the way. It was all very agreeable and interesting. I then headed to a nearby Crow Nation store to buy a beaded horsehair keyring to add to my collection swinging from Speranza’s key. I have no cargo room for more substantial souvenirs and even this modest idea is now getting out of hand!

I had planned to “do” Yellowstone National Park today as well. This involved driving to Cody in Wyoming, home to Buffalo Bill of that ilk and taking US-20 West through the park to my reserved hotel in West Yellowstone. I had spent far longer than I had optimistically expected at Little Bighorn, however, so by the time I got to Cody it was too late to do anything more there than drive through the main drag and recognise another Dodge City or Deadwood for what it was.

I hastily consulted Google Maps to check how long the next stage would take. It offered two options; one on US-20 as planned and another that involved retracing my steps and taking an interstate. One was two hours and a bit. Another was four hours and a bit. I confused the two and reluctantly changed my plan thinking that it was too late to spend so long driving through the park in what would be darkness anyway. D’oh!

I didn’t realise my mistake until I had passed the point of no return so irritably wasted a couple of hours (and the best part of a tank of petrol) going back through towns I had never planned to see again. The final run to West Yellowstone was along twisty forest roads (usually my favourite) but in bad light and worse weather. I narrowly avoided one elk (who was far less flustered by the encounter than I was) and spend fifty miles anxiously watching out for his brethren.

The Montana Department of Transport, I discovered, has a rather slapdash approach to roadworks. In that last fifty miles I also had to drive over a very rough surface caused by their ripping up the whole road to repair it, rather than fixing one carriageway at a time in the usual way. The temporary surface was not even the small pebbles of a gravel road; it was rubble! They had lowered the speed limit from 55mph to 35mph in recognition of this but to protect Speranza’s “running shoes” and prevent throwing up rocks onto her bodywork, I had to drive much more slowly. Locals in their big pick-up trucks with foot-thick tyres could not see my problem and got a bit irritated, alas.

I arrived at my hotel, tired and grumpy, at 0930pm – too late to eat. Food stops had been my first sacrifice on realising the time problem caused by my stupid mistake. On the positive side, however, I have solved my timing issue for the run to Vancouver. I knew I was going to have to slow my pace in order to arrive on Sunday afternoon in time to deliver Speranza to the Ferrari dealer there on Monday morning. Now I have simply booked a second night in Yellowstone and will give the famous park the attention it probably always deserved.