A Tullyroan Travelogue

Every holiday I seem to go on I face the same dilemma.

The tourist hotspots draw you towards them like a magnet.  They are highlighted on the map, there are endless roadside signs encouraging you to take the exit in 40 miles, then 10 miles, then 5 miles and somehow the names of these places are lodged in my subconscious from all the media that has flowed out of America and into my brain over the last 31 years.

Yellowstone Park is one such place, an area of incredible natural beauty and yet there was something about being there that didn’t quite sit right.  The RV park we were staying in had so many rules I was nervous that I was going to break one simply by walking to the bathroom in my pyjamas. The streets were filled with souvenir shops and although we didn’t see a black bear or a grizzly bear (despite being told to be careful not to run over them at every bend in the road) we had no trouble spotting a much more common breed…Homo Touristicus.

So despite the fact that we were camping on the doorstep of Yellowstone with the possibility of spending the rest of the day in the park the three of us decided to move on.  There was a longing for a more grounded experience of the real Northwest America.  We continued to journey east through Montana leaving the Rocky Mountains behind and entering The Great Plains.

We stopped in Laurel for some supplies and a bite of lunch in the back of the van – cheese, ham, bread, salad, some left over pork ribs from last night and root beer (for me) – and after another hour on the I-90 we reached the sight of the Battle of Little Bighorn.  We pulled in to visit and learn something about the turbulence of the country at the time.  The battlefield was speckled with white crosses, the locations at which men had died.  The two main protagonists were General Custer leading the 7th Cavalry Regiment (which I was interested to discover included 128 Irish immigrants out of a total of around 850 men) and Sitting Bull, the spiritual leader of the Lakota people who had recently been successful in uniting the Lakota and Cheyenne.  Custer died in the battle (hence the term ‘Custer’s Last Stand’) and the American soldiers were overrun as one of the Cheyenne described it ‘like water circling round a stone’.  This battle was won by the native Americans but they would unequivocally go on to lose the war.

It is hard to imagine what it must of been like to have inhabited a land for thousands of years to then have invaded by a foreign race.  I found myself strangely torn as I stood at the graves of the many American soldiers who had died on June 25th 1876.  On one hand the grave injustice at what the colonies did to the native people and yet these soldiers were simple people, many of them immigrants laying their lives down for their country.

One more hour on the road and moving further off the tourist trail brought us to the sleepy town of Ranchester and we were welcomed into Lazy RV Park by Shirley.  We parked on the corner of a block surrounded by local residents.

As we sit eating our dinner at the picnic table we see a welder working on his caravan then resting to enjoy the warm evening air.  There is a teenager haring past us on a quad bike with a lawn mower in tow going so fast the mower is almost floating off the ground and a puppy belonging to the couple next to us escapes and runs into the RV to say hello.

This is the America we’ve been looking for.  Give me Ranchester over Yellowstone any day.