DeSmet, SD to Custer State Park, SD
Prairie dawn |
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.
All those pictures are made of corn! All corn, I tell you! |
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.
Leaping small canyons in a single bound! |
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.
You can see that Zoe is sitting here working on her Junior Ranger badge. |
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:
***
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.