Part 2 of a U.S. summer road trip.

People are friendly and welcoming rural America. Complete strangers want to show you where to find the best buys in grocery stores, talk politics or anything else and always seem fascinated with Canada.

Rural Americans are pretty frank about how they feel about things too and say what they think.

On the way down to Yellowstone National Park we stopped in an Arby’s for lunch in Livingstone, Mont. A man I assumed was the manager was taking orders. A lot of tourists pass through there.

“How’s it going?” I asked.

“Well, at least you speak English,” he said.

About a half hour later, and still basking in the warm fuzzy feeling I get from exchanges like that, we were standing in a Walgreen’s checkout waiting to pay for batteries and ice as the cashier caught up on the latest with a military couple who squeezed their marriage in between tours of duty overseas. It felt good, really good to be here, I was thinking when it occurred to me that I was standing amidst the demographic that voted in George W. Bush – twice.

A trip to Yellowstone should be on everyone’s bucket list. It’s intensely beautiful and there’s nothing like the feeling of driving around on top of the world’s largest active volcano. Scared the hell out of my daughter the whole time we were there.

Tourists are fun to watch in national parks when animals show up. In Jasper National Park a few days prior, we watched about 30 Asian tourists crowd around one of the biggest buck elks I’ve ever seen grazing on the side of the highway, frantically snapping pictures from just a few feet away. Crowding a big animal with a huge rack of antlers is a bad idea and we weren’t hanging around to witness the outcome of that nature excursion.

In Yellowstone the roads are old and narrow and the motor homes are big. So when a baby bear pokes his head out from behind a tree, the traffic jams are immediate, with drivers abandoning vehicles and families scrambling to get pictures. Park rangers rush in and try to keep the tourists and wildlife separated.

Yellowstone is pocked with steam vents, boiling lakes, geysers and signs warning visitors to stay on wooden paths or risk falling through weak crust into underground chambers and being boiled alive. They reinforce the warnings with an illustration of a boy dressed like a 1950s cub scout hollering as he gets scalded and his little beanie cap flies off his head. Only the government, I thought, would depict a kid dressed like a nerd who had it coming to him.

Yellowstone’s average elevation is 8,000 feet above sea level, so it’s a long drive down a winding, narrow mountain highway at night to Cody, Wyo., a genuine old wild west town just big enough to have a Wal-Mart.

Tourism in Yellowstone and the motorcycle rally just wrapping up in Sturgis, South Dakota, meant Cody, like most towns in the region, was booked up solid. I prepared for a long, dark, drive to Sheridan – until we met Jose, the night clerk at the King’s Inn, with a running mental inventory of vacancies who phoned around till he found one.

He talked to my wife as I paid over the phone for a room he’d found in Powell, about 20 miles away.

“Please, I cannot implore you enough,” Jose said. “Take the room. Don’t let him drive to Sheridan. The road at night is terrible, high and windy. I did it once. There were animals all over the road. I thought I would be killed. I will never drive it at night again.”

The next day I ate a buffalo steak in Custer, South Dakota, that tasted like liver and my daughter picked up a fist-sized chunk of granite from the mountain being carved into a statue of Chief Crazy Horse. I think it’s from his nose.

Next time: No joy in Nebraska. Downtime at Grandma Audre’s and Interstates suck.

photos@nanaimobulletin.com