So far everything is going well. It's been pretty fun. Saturday was a wedding in Iowa. It wasn't that bad, as the service was about 30 minutes, and then the reception was like 6.5 hours. They blew out the sound and lights twice (actually took out power strips, not breakers), and the first time everyone just started singing. It was a little scary how well some people knew the songs, so that was interesting to see. It was a bit over 100 there, with heat indexes around 115. So we stayed inside a lot. Then was off west on Sunday for lots of camping.

BTW, gas is dirt cheap in Iowa, premium is cheaper than regular in Nebraska (apparently nobody wants ethanol, so it's significantly cheaper), and the regular is only 85 octane in Wyoming but everything's a bit pricy.

In Nebraska we drove through to Ogallala and camped right on the edge of Lake Ogallala. It was pretty nice there. The next day we drove to see some friends in Wyoming who we hadn't seen for about 10 years. It was nice to see them again, and we ended up spending most of the day there. By the time we got on the road and ate dinner and decided to find a place to stay it was like 10pm, so we stayed at this hole in Rawlins. BTW, in Wyoming the cheap hotels are like $150/night since people are traveling and the other options are hundreds of miles away. If you're already expecting and packed for semi-rustic camping though, you can get away with cheaper places though. Wouldn't want to use them for much more than a roof over the head though.

After that we've been camping in the Grant Tetons area, the first couple nights in a KOA just outside of Jackson, tonight in the park, and the next few in Yellowstone. Those are a bit nicer. Fun things include a chuckwagon style meal and show, whitewater rafting, finding all the good places to eat from the locals (much better than paying the $30/plate for average food), and driving around the parks taking pictures of wildlife and scenery. I've only gone through a few GB so far, but think I have some good shots. I'll have to go through them and post them somewher when I get back.

The computer situation on the trip is sorta funny. Since a large portion of the trip involved I-35 in MN (which we all have seen plenty), Iowa, and Nebraska, we've had a LAN in the car with cellular Internet Access. It was pretty much in solid use until the western edge of Nebraska, and a couple times a day in Wyoming so everyone can check email. It's actually working pretty well, and much to my surprise after tracking down the source of the slow connection for a while it does support streaming audio decently. That 20s latency (not a typo) is killer though... They're useful for looking things up, and google maps comes in very handy while traveling when you haven't bothered to plan ahead and are just going with whatever seems interesting to do for the day. It's also handy for offloading a few memory cards per day. Although we forgot media and had to pick up a 30 pack of DVD-Rs to store pictures. Hopefully that'll last the trip. Two guys with DSLRs shooting RAW eats through stuff at an amazing rate...

I think that's enough for now. I haven't gotten any frantic phone calls so I can only assume Pete hasn't burned my house down or anything and stuff is OK in the cities. Although I do see Bethel has been having the all too common network issues again. Anyways, I better double check all my food and toiletries are in bear-resistant containers and get some sleep.