The Scheins' Blog: Field Work!

Although leaving Sarah and the rugrats was hard, I was very excited to get to do some field work this summer for the 1st time in quite a while. My 1st 2 weeks (last 2 weeks of July) were based in Red Lodge, Montana, which is right in the middle of the state on the southern border, just a couple of miles from Wyoming.

1st, the drive - I always forget how much farther east Philly is than Birmingham. In my mind it's just a straight shot north, but it isn't at all. I left Thursday night thinking that would be plenty of time to get there by Sunday afternoon. After sleeping only 2 hours the 1st morning at dawn in Ohio, and then about 6 hours the next night in eastern South Dakota, I just made it into camp at about 7pm local time Sunday night - 48 hours! I'll be leaving earlier next year.

Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois were god awful, mind-numbing, coma-inducing, B-O-R-I-N-G! God, I'm not looking forward to that leg of the trip every year. It's a long way, too. Once I got into Wisconsin, it was a little better, but mostly because I had never driven up there before. I went across southern Wisconsin, then southern Minnesota, and that's when things finally started to change from typical eastern forests to more open plains with fewer trees. Of course that's mostly because it was all just farm fields, but there was a definite change in the landscape.

I tried to take pictures with my phone at every state line to send to Sarah to keep her updated on my progress. It's pretty sad that Ohio is so awful that you're actually glad that you made it to Indiana. There's no wonder these states are losing population.

Sitting in Saturday morning traffic in Chicago for no apparent reason. Weekday mornings must be miserable.

The 1st huge wind farms I drvoe through in southern Minnesota. This was by far the largest wind farm I've ever seen. There were turbines all the way to the horizon on both sides of the road. Amazing. Pretty good pictures for taking them with 1 hand on my phone while driving 70 mph, while texting and eating, huh? Just kidding - about the texting and eating. This was Friday afternoon.

By that evening, I started running into some great plains thunderstorms in western Minnesota and eastern South Dakota. I pulled off the interstate onto a deserted farm road to get close to one. This one was amazing - it went from a small, non-threatening storm into a huge, intimidating, nearly constant lightning show in just a few minutes. With all the lightning and the storm being so close, it was actually earily quiet. Just distant rumbling of the thunder and the wind gently rustling through the endless rows of corn. It was really amazing.

There were some amazing colors behind the storm toward the sunset, too.

100 miles further to the west and I was still watching this storm in my rearview mirror. Amazing.

The next morning I finally felt like I was out west. The land opened up, became drier, flatter, then rolling prairies. This awesome sculture is along the interstate in western South Dakota just outside some cool tourist trap called 1880 Town. They filmed parts of Dances with Wolves in this part of SD.

By that afternoon I was in Wyoming.

Again I drove by what appeared to be a small storm, or really just a spit of rain coming down from a cloud, but by the time it intersected with me on my path it turned out to be a hellacious wind and rain storm!