Man, it takes a while to get across South Dakota.  And what a variety of landscapes in a single state – prairie, barren rock desert, forested hills.  After having breakfast on the prairie, we continued west.  Our final destination was many hours away, but we planned several stops along the way to break up the drive. 

These certainly ran the gamut from the sublime to the ridiculous.  On the ridiculous side, we had (1) the Corn Palace, a huge building paneled, inside and out, with giant murals made entirely of ears of corn (whose idea was this?), and (2) Wall Drug, of the many highway signs.  The first provided us with popcorn to sustain us on our journey, and the second provided ice cream – that’s about all I can say for them. 

In between these two tourist traps, we hit our first national park – Badlands.  This did not disappoint.  It was absolutely beautiful, with otherworldly rock formations stretching out as far as the eye could see in every direction.  From the kids’ perspective the greatest thing about it was that you could climb around on everything – there was no concept of “staying on the trail” — there really was no trail because everything was rock.  We went on a hike, and the “trail” consisted of numbered markers stuck into the ground at seemingly random intervals, and you just made your way from one marker to the next as you pleased.  (For the kids, this meant climbing down into every canyon and then attempting to clamber back up on the other side.  Then halfway through the hike telling me how tired they are.)  It was really hot amongst all the rock – easily over 100 degrees – but much easier to cope with given the lack of humidity.  Aside from the mild stress of ensuring Lanie didn’t fall off a cliff while following her sisters into some ill-advised ascent, it was a great afternoon.  More Junior Ranger badges were obtained as well – this has become something of an obsession with the girls and I have to keep telling them to look around at the scenery and stop doing word searches and such.

We’ve had mostly beautiful (though often hot) weather so far, but today we experienced our first western thunderstorm.  We were on the road and could see it approaching – the sky is so big and open that we could see a spectacular lightning show well before the storm hit us.  When it eventually did, the van was suddenly lurching from the buffeting winds, and the rain was probably the hardest I’ve ever experienced.  For a few minutes it was hard to see much of anything.  Then it was over, just like that, and it was amazing how quickly everything dried up. 

Dark was falling rapidly by the time we arrived at Custer State Park. By this time we’d crossed over from the Badlands terrain into the black hills – a landscape of one hill after another covered in pine trees – and into Mountain Time. It’s a huge place – it took us close to half an hour on winding, hilly roads to get from the entrance to our campground (which is one of several in the park).  From what we could see in the semi-darkness, everything was beautiful.  Most things were closed up, and the one staff person we could find did not know which campsite we had reserved for the next three nights.  Eventually, he just told us that there was only one tent site left, so that must be the one we had reserved.  (Spoiler alert for tomorrow’s entry: the campsite was not, in fact, the one we had reserved.)

This was the first time we’d used our tent, and we got things set up pretty quickly considering.  (All those times I made the girls put the tent up and take it down this summer really paid off.  At one point, when the setup was not quite complete, we’d let the kids go off to the 9pm campfire program just down the hill.  Bob and I were scratching our heads trying to figure out how to get the rain flap on, and he actually said, “The kids know how to do this.”  Never fear, we figured it out without having to ask our 8-year-old!)  We had another big rainstorm overnight, but our tent proved up to the challenge.

This is some car fun for my friends at work:

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From Bob:

It’s probably been said before, perhaps by Louis and Clark themselves, that one finds two polar extremes when traveling across South Dakota.  There’s the unforgettable brilliance of the Badlands landscape on one hand, and the hyper tackiness of Wall Drug on the next.  Badlands is brilliant, with unimaginable rock formations and striations of color.  They let you walk all over the place like ants on meringue.  There are fossils everywhere; you trip on the things.

                Wall Drug is a hole.

                Now someone told me it was a cool place, which raised my expectations.  The 30,000 Wall Drug billboards contributed to the thought that there was something special here.  And what do we find, a bunch of junk administered, strangely, by a hive of Eastern Europeans.  To be fair, the Eastern Europeans who work in Wall Drug proper are more than competent, but the ones they farm out to the other Wall, SD, establishments are definitely second-string.   We ate at a faux Mexican place across the street from the big WD, and it was pretty sketchy (though no intestinal problems so far, and, trust me, that thought weighs heavily when your kids are eating from a fried chicken and pizza buffet and you have three more hours to drive after dinner). Every wait person was Russian. Except the hostesses, who were from China, I think.   Not what I expected from the middle of South Dakota.

                I should say that the diversity of nationalities was welcome. As a matter of fact we have seen people from many different countries on this trip, in just about all the places we’ve visited.  We are tourists just like the Israeli people we walked through the badlands with and the British people we we saw stumbling through the Corn Palace.

 Oh, and I should also say that the kids enthusiastically loved the whole Wall experience.