The road followed a river with mountains on both sides.

We finally arrived at the east entrance to the park. It was past 9 p.m. and the entrance was unguarded. There was a note from the rangers stating that we could pay the entrance fee when we leave the park. I loved the honor system.

After about 20 minutes we could see a vast lake appearing behind the trees.

The full moon was out on the eastern sky while the orange glow of the sunset still dominated the western horizon. The vast, tranquil lake forced us to stop cold in our track. We couldn’t care less about setting camp in daylight; we had to stop to take some photos, which did not do justice to the scenery of the lake in twilight.

We arrived at Bridge Bay campsite around 10 p.m. The camp ground, which consisted of about 400 sites, was full! Fortunately we had reserved a spot earlier in the day. The staff was extremely friendly and showed us a map of the large camp ground. We bought some firewood, kindling. Tai, Qui, and I set up the two tents while Anh-Hoa started the fire. Being inexperienced campers, we didn’t have all the necessary equipment, especially padding for our sleeping bags.

This is how our camp site looked the following morning.

Notice the frost on the car roof? The temperature dropped down to the 30s overnight. In the evening, the camp fire kept us warm.

It was our first night outdoors of the trip, and we couldn’t pick a more beautiful place to camp, the bright full moon ahead, Yellowstone lake nearby, and tall evergreens surrounding us. The camp ground was full of vehicles with out-of-state license plates. But ours from Massachusetts was probably the farthest.

That night, however, our excitement was subdued by the hard, rocky, damp ground and the freezing temperature. I tossed and turned and managed only about one hour of sleep. Qui slept sitting up in the other tent to avoid the hard ground. We newbie campers couldn’t wait for the night to be over.

The road through Black Hills National Forest was smooth and beautiful, and it was easy doing 85 mph without knowing it.

To do justice to the beautiful scenery, I’m going to post large-size photos whenever possible from now on.

A curvy road, blue sky, mild temperature, a good deal of sunshine, and a car that shifts as smoothly as butter. What could possibly be better? Well, only one thing is better: doing all this in a BMW F800GS motorcycle.

Around noon, we entered Wyoming and stopped for gas around Newcastle. Not wanting to be stranded gasless in the middle of nowhere, we usually filled up the tank whenever it was half full.

Lunch was a buffet at a Pizza Hut. Decent food for only $6 per person. I made another phone call to my parents to check up on my daughter. After lunch, following another convertible with an Ohio license plate, we continued eastward on Highway 16 through Thunder Basin National Grassland before rejoining Interstate 90 to aim for Bighorn National Forest.

The scenery was again simply spectacular.

We got a glimpse of snow-covered mountains in the distant, having no idea that in a few hours we would be crossing them.

The BMW winked at the sights of mountains ahead. Tai was in the driver’s seat.

As I-90 started to head north, we maintained our eastward heading by turning left onto Highway 14 with Bighorn National Forest looming straight ahead.

The road started to climb quickly.

Bighorn National Forest consists of over 1.1 million acres along the spine of the Big Horn Mountains, an outlying mountain range separated from the rest of the Rocky Mountains by Bighorn Basin. Elevations range from 5,000 feet along the sagebrush and grass-covered lowlands at the foot of the mountains, to 13,189 feet on top of Cloud Peak. The forest is named after the Bighorn River.

Tai and Qui enjoyed a vista point.

The forest is primarily lodgepole pine, along with several species of spruce, fir, and aspen.

As we continued to climb, snow started to appear on the ground.

We stopped at 9430 feet to take some photos.

It was a meditation exercise driving through a small road cutting through massive snow on a mountain top, above the tree line, with just white clouds ahead.

On the other side of the mountain, the road dropped down… fast!

The photos didn’t do justice to how steep the road was.

Again, I wished I had been straddling a motorcycle instead.

Our hurried drive to Yellowstone was halted by a few careless pedestrians.

The road was cleared shortly.

The scenery was so peaceful, so beautiful. The stunning mountains and lakes and deserts were still ahead of us, but at this moment, driving through the middle of Wyoming, with the slanting afternoon sunsine highlighting the dark mountains in the distant and the grassland along the highway, I kept repeating “This is America, this is America” in my head, feeling awed by the rugged beauty of this vast country was.

As the sun settled near the horizon, we went through Cody, the last main town before Shoshone National Forest and Yellowstone. More to come, but here is a teaser… well, not the guy, but the scenery.

The thunderstorms of the previous evening had cleared the way for a gorgeous, sunny, warm morning in Rapid City. We had a quick breakfast at the Econo Lodge in this second-largest city in the state of South Dakota. The city got its name from Rapid Creek, on which it was established in 1876 by an influx of settlers shortly after gold was in discovered in the Black Hills region. Interestingly, the Sioux people have been waging a long legal battle to reclaim their land in this region. In 1980, the US Supreme Court ruled that the US government had indeed stolen the land when it unilaterally broke away from a treaty guaranteeing that the Black Hills belonged to the Sioux Nation. The government offered monetary compensation; the Sioux people declined, still wanting their land back. And the dispute is still not resolved.

Our plan for the day was to visit nearby Mount Rushmore, drive through Bighorn National Forest, and enter Yellowstone from the east. After about 30 minutes, we arrived at Mount Rushmore and stopped to take the obligatory photo of the entrance.

After a bend in the road, we finally saw the US presidents!

After parking the car in a garage that was sturdily built into the side of the mountain and looked better than any garage in Boston, we walked up the stairs to take some photos.

White people took the mountain from the Lakota Sioux native Americans after a series of military campaigns in the late 1870s. In 1885, the mountain was named after Charles E. Rushmore, a prominent New York lawyer, who was on a prospecting expedition. Scupltor Gutzon Borglum started the carving started in 1927 and his son finished it in 1941, with the entire project costing close to USD 1 million. Each figure was about 60 feet high.

The walkway to the viewing platform was surrounded by the flags of the 50 states. I looked for the flags of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the Republic of California and didn’t know which one I belonged to. Perhaps both.

Anh-Hoa tried to look presidential.

Some close-up photos.

We left Mount Rushmore after about 30 minutes, headed down the mountain and was promptly stuck in a road construction for another half hour.

More to come…

The changes in elevation were greatly welcome. Instead of the $15 park entry fee, we decided to opt for the $80 pass that would allow us access to all national parks. A great deal!

Badlands National Park consists of 244,000 acres of sharply eroded buttes, pinnacles, and spires blended with the largest protected mixed grass prairie in the United States. It is the site of the reintroduction of the black-footed ferret, the most endangered land mammal in North America.

The area was designated a national park on November 10, 1978.

For 11,000 years, Native Americans–the Lakota, paleo-Indians, and the Arikara–used this area for their hunting grounds. Their descendants live today in North Dakota as a part of the Three Affiliated Tribes. Eroding out of the stream banks today are the rocks and charcoal of their campfires, as well as the arrowheads and tools they used to butcher bison, rabbits, and other game. From the top of the Badlands Wall, they could scan the area for enemies and wandering herds. If hunting was good, they might hang on into winter, before retracing their way to their villages along the Missouri River. By one hundred and fifty years ago, the Great Sioux Nation consisting of seven bands including the Oglala Lakota, had displaced the other tribes from the northern prairie. (Wikipedia)

We simply stood in awe at the geographical magic in front of us, humbled by its history and natural beauty.

By the time we finished driving through the park, the sun had already set. We could see a spectacular lightning show on the southwestern sky. As we re-joined I-90 to head to Rapid City, heavy rain fell, and lightning and thunders bombarded our small car. After less than two hours, Rapid City appeared through the blurry windshield. We crashed at an Econo Lodge for the night. Tomorrow would be Mount Rushmore and then a mad dash to Yellowstone National Park.

This is going to be my first picture-intensive post. We woke up to a beautiful sunny morning in La Crosse, Wisconsin and decided to check out downtown La Crosse, which turned out to be a peaceful small town by the mighty Mississippi river. Unfortunately we didn’t have the foresight to stop and take a few photos of the town. We then crossed over to the other side of the Mississippi to enter Minnesota.

We stopped at the Minnesota side to take a few photos of the famed river.

Looking at the tranquil, slow-moving water, we found it hard to believe that this was the largest river system in North America, starting at Lake Itasca, Minnesota, and traveling 2320 miles southwards to New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico. According to Wikipedia, “with its major tributaries, the Missouri River and the Ohio River, the Mississippi drains all or parts of 31 U.S. states stretching from the Rocky Mountains in the west to the Appalachian Mountains in the east to the Canada–US border on the north, including most of the Great Plains, and is the fourth longest river in the world and the tenth most powerful river in the world.” I had seen the river from an airplane before, but this was the first time I got to see it up close.

We returned to the car to start the long drive to Badlands National Park, our first major destination. Our goal was to make it there before sunset. But first we had to travel through Minnesota, the Land of 10,000 Lakes and, except for Alaska, the northernmost state in the US. We didn’t see any lake but lots of this:

We played Taboo and Jeopardy to pass the time in the car. Interstate 90 was in excellent condition, and the BMW just wanted to eat up the miles rapidly.

We finally stopped near the border with South Dakota to have lunch at the Blue Line Cafe.

I hoped none of my former primary care patients, who had heard so much about healthy eating from me, would ever see the kinds of food we consumed on this road trip.

After lunch, it was more of the same flatness.

At one point, the sky started to look threatening.

But it cleared up as we crossed the Missouri River, which bisected South Dakota into halves known to residents as “East River” and “West River”. Eastern South Dakota is home to most of the state’s population, and fertile soil in this area is used to grow a variety of crops. West of the Missouri, ranching is the predominant agricultural activity and the economy is more dependent on tourism with attractions such as Badlands National Park and Mount Rushmore.

Suddenly the flatness was gone, and the BMW rejoiced the sight of curvy, hilly roads.

The Garmin GPS finally asked us to turn left onto Highway 240. And lo and behold!

More to come…

Our original plan was to take a short drive to Chicago where we would spend the evening checking out Mayor Emanuel’s city. I had already contacted one of my college roommates to arrange a meet-up. However, after a phone call to my parents in California to check up on our daughter, we decided to shorten the trip a day by skipping Chicago. We missed the kid too much! It was a pity that we missed one of the great American cities. We will have visit it another time.

We got up late, having gone to bed at 4:30 a.m. in the morning, and ate the generous Chinese Qui had brought the night before.

Shortly after leaving Ann Arbor, we started making plans on where to sleep for the night. I had wanted to try camping. Tai called a KOA campground near Madison, Wisconsin. The rate was decent, and there were plenty of sites available. I guess a campsite around Madison during the week is not that hard to come by. We pulled out our iPhones and checked the reviews on Yelp. Nice reviews for this site. We were all set! Somewhere near Kalamazoo, MI, we stopped by a Walmart to buy a sleeping bag for my wife and me. Yes, somehow we forgot to pack our sleeping bag.

However, the early afternoon witnessed the first signs of rain. I re-checked the weather. The forecast of cloudy weather had now been changed into scattered thunderstorms. Hmmm. Somehow we were all uncomfortable with the idea of all four newbies setting up camp in a thunderstorm in the semi-darkness. Adventurous, yes. Necessary, no. Scratch camping. We scrambled to find a place to stay along the way to our first main destination, Badlands National Park. I calculated that we would reach La Crosse, Wisconsin around 10 p.m. The Kayak app secured us a room at the clean and comfortable Microtel in Onalaska, which is next to La Crosse, for a nice price. We set up the GPS. The BMW was set on cruise control. Past Michigan, through northern Indiana, up Illinois, to Wisconsin. We put on the miles without stopping to take a single photo. We arrived at Onalaska, WI at the Garmin-predicted time. What a boring day. I went to bed dreaming of Badlands.

We had intended to leave early in the morning to get a head start and arrive in Michigan before sunset. But last minute preparations took the whole morning. My brother and Anh-Hoa’s sister and brother-in-law were at our house to help us pack. We did not bring much, just a change of clothes, some books. We had not really shipped much to California either, having decided to leave almost everything we had in Boston. We were to start afresh in California, beginning not just a new chapter but, as Anh-Hoa’s brother said, a whole new book.

We also packed two tents for 4 people. A few days prior we had decided to invite two our nephews, Tai and Qui, to join us on this trip. It was summer and they had some free time. Like us, they had never done any cross-country traveling before. The plan was to pick up Tai in Quincy, MA and head to Qui’s place at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. As we intended to cover lots of miles each day, having some extra drivers were extremely helpful.

Four people in a tiny BMW 128i convertible required judicious packing. The tiny trunk of the 128i was apparently designed to fit at most a backpack for a trip around town, not a 4000-mile-plus trip across this vast country in thunderstorms, desert heat, freezing mountain weather. Living so close to the hospital, I had barely put in any mile on the car in the past two years. This trip will increase the mileage on the car by more than fifty percent. Before the trip, one of Anh-Hoa’s sisters told us that we would destroy this car. “Rent a car!” she advised us, feeling sorry for our stupidity in driving an almost brand-new car cross country. But what was a car for if not for driving? We didn’t buy this car to pamper it. We bought it to drive it. And if there were any problem with the car on this trip, we would still have the warranty and BMW road-side assistance! Well, our sister’s advice probably had some validity–throughout this trip, the only BMWs I saw were GS motorcycles tackling the national parks and Southwestern desert dirt roads.

My father didn’t worry about the car but fretted about our safety. To him, American roads were full of robbers and thieves lurking from behind the bushes to rob innocent people. OK, he didn’t really think that, but he was still full of worries. “Pick a nice hotel to stay in,” he advised. “Don’t stay at shady motels.” Good advice. I didn’t quite tell him about our plan to camp along the way even though I felt that camping was probably much safer and more hygiene than staying in cheap motels.

We said goodbye to our neighbors, Liza, Si, and Bannon.

We finally locked up the house, its future uncertain in this crappy real estate market, around 11 a.m. and stopped by a Star Market to say goodbye to Mo, Simone, and Victor. We would definitely miss them so much as our years in Boston have been greatly enriched by knowing them. After a short drive to Quincy to pick up Tai, we jumped on Interstate 93 then I-90 to leave Massachusetts.

Tai recently finished his Master’s program at Boston University and jumped on the opportunity to join this cross-country trip. His mother, who is Anh-Hoa’s older sister, was probably as worried as my Dad about all the lurking roadside dangers but managed to appear calm when we said goodbye.

We didn’t take any photo because there wasn’t anything interesting. Anh-Hoa and I had taken the same road last year during our trip to Niagara Falls. Somewhere upstate New York, it started to rain on and off. Then we entered a ferocious thunderstorm. Anh-Hoa was driving and suddenly the rain poured down so thickly that visibility was reduced to only a few feet. We struggled to avoid cars that had stopped on the side of the road. After about ten minutes, we exited the thunderstorm, happy that the first day of the trip didn’t end up disastrous.

We followed the southern edge of Lake Eerie to enter Pennsylvania, then Ohio, before turning north to Ann Arbor. We arrived on the campus of the University of Michigan past four o’clock in the morning. Dead tired, we passed out on the floor of Qui’s apartment.

Qui has just finished his first year at the Ph.D. program in Biostatistics at the University of Michigan. He’s taking a break of his summer research to join our expedition. Qui’s mother, who is the older sister of both Tai’s mother and Anh-Hoa, is another worrier.

Future reports will have less text and more photos, I promise.

Thank you for the vibrant fall foliage, the romantic snowfalls, the Sunday afternoons with white sailboats gracefully gliding on the tranquil surface of the Charles river. Thank you for the MFA, Fenway Park, Haymarket, and Boston Commons. And thank you for the honesty in displaying your flaws, with your segregated ethnic neighborhoods, your axle-breaking potholes, and, most memorably of all, your love of the horn as the light barely turns green.

Thank you for the Revolution, Bruins, Patriots, Celtics, and Sox, for all those years of dashed hopes and a few moments of ecstasy.

Thank you for introducing me to all the people who have molded me into who I am today–countless friends, mentors, patients, nurses, and even random strangers in the streets.

Thank you for that cool November night when the blue lights on the Zakim Bridge mesmerized her while she mesmerized me as I drove her home.

Thank you for that winter evening when we strolled along the snow-covered river bank by the Weeks footbridge, shivering in the cold air, her soft hand burning hot in mine.

Thank you for those strong, shrieking cries after I cut the umbilical cord, for all the sleepless nights, fumbling feeding sessions, and indescribable joy of parenthood.

Thank you, Boston, for everything. You will always be in my heart.

You can read Mr. Blog’s reflection on the anti-China demonstration here.

Yes, there are of course problems with the Canadian health care system, but the above criticisms are simply not true. And to summarize a great post from the Incidental Economist blog,

1. Canadian doctors are not flocking to the US to practice.
2. Canadian patients are not flocking here to get care.
3. Canadian physicians are actually more satisfied than their American counterparts.
4. Wait times are not simply because of a single-payer system.
5. Canadian infant mortality is superior to that of the US.
6. Care is of course also rationed in the US!

Check out the evidence here.