Our Wild West journey

The open road called, and I answered. On a cool November morning, my husband and I climbed aboard a regional jet in Brunswick, a small city that anchors Georgia's light-splashed Golden Isles, bound for Atlanta for a change of planes, and then on to Spokane, Washington. We rented a car at the airport, and then, just like that, began driving eastbound and down back to Georgia on a cross-country journey across the very same terrain we had just flown.

My dream since I was a kid has always been to drive coast-to-coast but life happens. In less than a year's time I lost my beloved brother to complications from a two-decade battle with transverse myelitis, my two 19-year-old brother and sister cats, and my sanity from taking a direct hit from Hurricane Helene, the storm that essentially flattened our town with Category 2 winds. My world had shifted to a place where nothing quite fit anymore, and I couldn't see very far down the road.

In a moment of clarity, one of now or never, with no funerals to attend or sick folks or elderly cats to watch over, I chose to finally chase the sunrise. Come hell or high water, I was going to achieve my teenage dream of driving across the country. I would find out just how far down the road I could go to for a cathartic getaway filled with adventures, open roads, big skies, different cultures and new perspectives.

When I learned to drive at 14 years old, I instantly became a road warrior and love the sounds that come with it. Other road warriors know it: the unending white noise of motion, the whistling of the wind with the windows down, the rhythmic purring of tire rubber on pavement and the deep rumbling of other vehicles passing by. My inner child could hardly wait for the epic journey.

Since Roy and I had been to Seattle and Washington State before, we chose Spokane as our starting point. I bought a big paper atlas - there would be no GPS on the trip - and marked our seven-day sojourn state by state, town by town, highway by highway, hotel by hotel.

After our first overnight in Coeur d'Alene in scenic, idyllic Idaho, still full of bursts of fall color in vibrant yellows and reds, we hit the Montana state line on a gray, rainy morning. We oohed and aahed at the incredible forested mountains of the Bitterroot Range, now swathed in mist, and marveled at the pine forests that no matter how spectacular, just can't compete with Georgia's statuesque pines.

For unending miles, we followed Interstate 90 and the Clark Fork River, its clear water sparkling even under cloudy skies. Somewhere along the way, in the ranching community of Drummond, Montana, population maybe 350, we stopped at Parker's Restaurant for the most memorable meal of the trip.

Our server was incredibly enthusiastic and friendly, and the diner had a fun, cozy atmosphere. The restaurant offers, last I checked, some 135 unique burger variations, featuring ingredients like crab, Spam, pineapple, Fritos, omelets, and even spinach. I opted for a simple cheeseburger, but it was so good that I couldn't help but inhale it and wonder aloud how Montana gets its beef so tasty.

From Bozeman to Billings, we climbed and then descended the Continental Divide and left the jagged Rockies behind as the landscape unfurled into the Great Plains. The rain had fled, and now the sky was enormous, a canvas of scattered light and a blue so vivid that it seemed more dream than reality. As we turned off the interstate onto ribbons of winding back roads, the magic of Big Sky Country unfolded before us. The earth and sky blurred into one seamless expanse, their edges softening until it was impossible to tell where the golden plains ended and the endless blue began.

From Montana, we crossed briefly into North Dakota, and then zipped to the South Dakota small town of Sturgis, with its population of about 7,000 that somehow explodes every August to upwards of 700,000 during the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. Driving through, it is unbelievable how so many people and their motorcycles could even cram and fold into such a diminutive place.

In nearby Rapid City, we stopped to overnight and have dinner with Cal and Rebecca, my nephew who is stationed there in the Air Force and his wife, and their handsome, sweet son, Owen. It wasn't a random or accidental visit, as I planned it that way, and we could have taken lots of roads elsewhere in South Dakota, but I'm pretty sure it would have been a sin to not visit family when you're that close.

From Rapid City, we passed through the otherworldly terrain of the Badlands, a jumble of buttes, pinnacles, and spires striated in warm, rusty shades of red, brown, tan, and pink. It is stunning in its desolateness, a magical and awe-inspiring sample of Mother Nature's hand, and I couldn't help but wonder how many pioneers, settlers, and cowboys rode into those canyons and ridges, only to vanish into the land's silent, timeless embrace.

We drove south, stopping to stand in the crisp November wind at Wounded Knee, where we read the historical marker describing the heartbreaking events of 1890 when the U.S. Army's attempt to disarm the Lakota Sioux led to a devastating confrontation, claiming hundreds of lives. I shivered in the swirling wind, a mix of solemnity, reverence and grief for the lives lost and the resilience of the Lakota people.

Down through Nebraska's mesmerizing, wind-sculpted ocean of sandhills we moved on. Just weeks before our trip, we had rewatched "Lonesome Dove," the original cowboy series with Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones, so we made Ogallala, a once rough-and-tumble cowboy town mentioned myriad times in the show, a must-see in western Nebraska.

Ogallala stands as a sentinel on the wide-open high plains and was once the end of the trail for the western cattle drives. After lunch at the Front Street Steakhouse in the old western part of town, we also visited Boot Hill, a frontier-era cemetery sitting atop a rise and overlooking the South Platte River and where legend holds that cowboys were buried with their boots on.

The landscape stretched endlessly from Ogallala through Kansas to the Oklahoma border, a vast expanse of tabletop-flat prairie rising gently to an average elevation of 2,000 feet. Crossing the state line, I celebrated a personal milestone of having visited all fifty states, for as a farm girl raised on the no-money side of life, it was a dream that once seemed an impossibility.

In Oklahoma City, we finally turned the rental car from southward to eastward toward Georgia and home. Over the years, we have traveled to Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi and Alabama extensively, so we didn't really tarry long in any of those states.

Along the seven-day, 3,000-mile journey, traveling about half of the time on back roads and the other half on interstates, we saw a thrilling and incredible menagerie of wildlife: bald eagles, elk, coyote, turkey, bison, a lone wolf, pronghorn and herds of mule and white-tail deer. We talked to some wonderful folks along the way, and near Pine Ridge in South Dakota we heard Lakota spoken for the first time ever.

We had a safe journey, though not without two near-misses, saved each time, I'm convinced, by the grace of Miss Daisy, my guardian angel.

The first came in Montana, when an 18-wheeler pulled out of a side road and planted itself directly in our path. With Miss Daisy obviously at the wheel and both my feet smashing the brake pedal to the metal, I swerved like a maniac into the opposite lane where there was, thankfully, no incoming traffic. Somehow we missed the massive truck entirely, shaken but sound.

The second hairbreadth escape was in Kansas right at sunset. A whitetail buck, big and fully antlered, leaped out of nowhere and landed in front of the car, his muzzle just one second from smashing the front grill. Then, at the last possible instant before impact, he reared back and stood straight up on his two hind legs, and then in one lightning-fast movement pirouetted a full 180 degrees, as graceful as a ballerina, before leaping back into the field from where he had come. I'm certain Miss Daisy grabbed that deer by the scruff of the neck and hurled it back into the field.

Our further-flung road trip was certainly one of adventure, of dodging trucks, outsmarting deer and having a guardian angel named Miss Daisy. My inner road warrior had sprung back to life, ready to chase the next sunrise, the next cheeseburger and the next highway with promises of more unforgettable memories.

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Mary Ann Anderson is a writer living in Hazlehurst, Georgia.

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