We have finally arrived at Yellowstone, which in many ways is sort of the apex of our trip.  We’ll be staying here for four nights, which many have said is not enough (Yellowstone is bigger than Rhode Island), but should give us a good taste of the park.  The road from Cody to Yellowstone was, like all the roads we’ve been driving on lately, beautiful, remote, and hilly.

Yellowstone is amazingly beautiful.  We stopped at a random pullout on our way in to have our lunch, and after a short hike (during which Lanie fell in deep mud, I sank to my calf and dropped my glasses in mud while trying to rescue her, and Bob ended up knee-deep while carrying her out) we arrived on the coast of Yellowstone Lake where it was joined by Pelican Creek, with the mountains towering across the lake and the sun shining on the deep blue waters.  Any other place this would have been an A1 destination, but there’s so much stunning scenery here that this is barely a blip on the Yellowstone map.

Bob has been a little worried about bear encounters, so naturally the first person we met at Yellowstone was this crazy bear-obsessed woman, walking around the beach with bear mace in her hand, who tried to convince us that we immediately needed to buy a can (at $50).  (I’m glad we saved our money, since the bulk of our time at Yellowstone was spent on semi-crowded boardwalks surrounded by other people, with approximately 0% chance of a bear sighting.)

We’re camping at the Canyon Campground, which is fairly crowded but nicely wooded so you don’t feel cramped.  I was initially displeased that we were right next to the bathroom, but this actually turned out to be somewhat of an advantage since not many people seemed to use it and it was nice and close for the two occasions when I had to carry Lanie to the bathroom in the middle of the night through the bear-infested campground (at least according to the crazy bear lady). 

The best thing about this place — we’ve finally escaped the campfire ban!  At last, s’mores can be made and consumed.  In our excitement, we even cooked our dinner over the fire – kielbasa and apples.

***

From Bob:

We were only a few minutes into our first Yellowstone experience when we encountered one of the things that sets this place apart from all of the other places we’ve visited.  I sunk into it right up to my knee.  It was thick, thick MUD (thankfully not the boiling, sulfurous, volcanic kind).  I was rescuing Lanie, who had fallen all-fours into it, giving Jen a chance to dislodge her leg.  It was dicey for a few moments about whether she would be able to save her sandal. 

                It’s been so dry everywhere we’ve gone that the only surfaces we’ve seen have been parched grass, ancient volcanic rock (as in the Badlands and Devil’s Tower) or dried-up, hard-packed dirt.  We took it as a good sign, once we got ourselves out of the morass.  Maybe, if it was moist enough to be muddy in places,   we would be able to have our long-awaited campfire.  Close readers of this blog might remember that we haven’t been able to have one of those since Ohio, before we had a chance to stock up on s’mores ingredients.

Aside from giving us a greater appreciation for the fates of all those mammoths in South Dakota, this first hike in Yellowstone, Pelican Creek trail, also gave us our first exposure to another aspect of the Wild West that we had not encountered before: grizzly bears.  Once we made it through the swamp and over to the shore of magnificent Yellowstone Lake, we saw footprints from many different animals (this time mud was our friend), including grizzly bears.   We have entered Bear Country.

We would later find out at a nearby visitors’ center that a grizzly had walked along the shore early that morning, only three hours before we had been there.  Before we got to the visitors’ center, however, we got a crash course on bears from a fellow park visitor who seemed to know a lot about the subject.  A woman from Colorado who was sitting on the beach when we got there was almost giddy when she found out about the bear tracks.  She began to tell us everything she knew about bears.  These tracks were probably black bear because they didn’t have any clawmarks. No, wait, maybe those are clawmarks.  The’re definitely grizzly.  A ranger told her she would definitely see bears on her visit, and she had.  She had run up to a roadside crevasse – against park regulations – to take a picture of a black bear and cub down below.  She made her husband walk in front of her and carry their can of bear mace in his backpack where she could reach it in an emergency.  She tried to make him walk right in front of her on the beach, where visibility was several hundred feet (we’re meant not to get closer than 100 yards to bears).

When you encounter a bear on a trail – and she made it clear that we would encounter a bear on the trail – she told us that we should not run or turn around but walk slowly backward and not make eye contact with the bear.  We should talk calmly, not scream, to the bear.

She was very happy to hike with us back the parking lot  (those guys knew a mud-free way back) because  you’re supposed to hike in parties of three or more and you’re supposed to make lots of different noises on the trail.  This last bit is something we’ve already mastered.

It turns out she may have been a little coocoo for cocoabears.  During the 3/4 –mile walk back to the cars, she prattled on nervously about bears.  It seems, in fact, that she is so concerned about bears that she sent her children to Catholic school.  Actually, by this point I only heard snippets of her conversation with Jen and the girls, so this part might not be 100-percent accurate.  I was walking ahead with her husband, a Red Sox and Patriots fan who was eager talk with someone from New England about these things (and, apparently, to anyone who could talk about anything but bears).  We talked so ardently and walked so far ahead that our friend was out of reach of the bear mace for a while. 

Luckily, we made back to the parking lot without further incident.  Except, once we got to our car, guess what we saw?  You’ll never guess.  A HAWAII license plate.  You can imagine our excitement.  We’ve already seen Alaska on our trip.  We’ll almost certainly get a full set by the time we get home, even if we have to drive through Delaware to do it. 

Delaware, a bear-free state, as far as I know.

First, a moment of gratitude for the perplexing fact that none of the places we’ve camped have seemed to have any substantial mosquito population.  Is it the drought?  Are these places just divinely blessed and keeping quiet about it so we all don’t move here?  Whatever the reason, we have been amazed and delighted that night after night, as we cook, eat, and play outdoors, we have suffered nary a bite.  (This is really saying something because Lanie is a total mosquito magnet.  If there is any mosquito within a mile of her, it will arrive and bite her repeatedly.)   We haven’t even pulled the bug spray out of the car.

In the case of our current tipi accommodations, this has been a key factor.  Our tipi walls don’t in fact come all the way to the ground, so there is a good 6 inches of space at floor level (right where we’re sleeping, in fact) that is wide open.  (The top doesn’t close completely either.  We’re not sure what people are supposed to do when it rains, but are grateful we weren’t forced to confront this question.)  The sound of the rushing water in the creek also proved conducive to good sleeping.

We started the day by wading in the creek behind our tipi, which was rather cold and very fast-moving.  Zoe and Nadia managed to work their way upstream a fair distance, and of course Lanie is always game to follow.  (I don’t know why we kid ourselves about the wading thing.  They invariably end up wet and muddy from head to toe.  We ended up letting them go back in later in the afternoon in their bathing suits.)  Then, off to explore Cody.

Cody is the town that was founded by Buffalo Bill, and they don’t let you forget it.  There are lots of Wild West-themed attractions, restaurants, etc.  We hit a couple of these and wandered through a few stores, but in general kept it a pretty low-key day.  The location of the town is beautiful, with mountains rising up in every direction.

 

Our big event of the day was the Cody Nite Rodeo, where we got to see such traditional activities as bull riding, calf roping, barrel racing, and trick riding.  At one point all the kids were called down to the arena (and it was unbelievable how many kids poured out of the crowd).  They then released three calves with ribbons on their tails, and set the kids loose to try to be the first to get a ribbon.  I’ve seldom seen such mayhem.  The kids loved it and all was well, until they sent them back to their seats and somehow Lanie went off the field at the wrong exit.  There were so many kids that we hadn’t seen where she’d gone, and we had all split up and were looking frantically for her when the announcer said there there were two lost little girls in the souvenir shop.  Lanie was rather traumatized by this whole event and had a little trouble enjoying the rest of the rodeo, but she seemed fully recovered the next morning.

***

From Bob:

Various parts of this trip have been hard on each of us, for sure, but lately we should pity Nadia, who desperately yearns to ride – or at least befriend – every horse she sees.  And there are a lot of horses in Wyoming.  There are constant offers for trail rides that she hopefully asks us to consider.  There is little hope in this stage of the trip; her riding will take place at our Colorado ranch residency, in about a week or so.

                Tonight she got the next best thing to actually approaching a horse.  The Cody Nite Rodeo is dripping with cowboy-ness, yet seemingly much more authentic than anything else in this rather touristy town.  It runs, they say, for 94 nights in a row over the spring and summer, and we got to see cowboys and cowgirls riding and roping, racing around barrels, and hanging on for dear life on bucking broncos and steers.  Tonight, nobody was able to hold on long enough to win the bull riding portion of the rodeo.

                As we were here on the last night of the month, however, we were treated the awarding of prize belt buckles to the most consistent competitors in the month of July for each event.   They were nice, big belt buckles, too; we could see them from all the way up in the stands.

                Another thing that marked our night at the rodeo was that the chief rodeo clown’s mother had died earlier today.  Midway through the evening, he knelt down in the middle of the ring with his main sidekicks (two guys with red tassels coming off the back of their clothes – they’re called bullfighters because one main part of their job is to distract the bull so the guy who just fell off the bull has a chance of surviving) and said a prayer.  Then the main clown put his hat back on and went on with his shenanigans.  It’s pretty hardcore here in the World Capital of Rodeo.  It’s drenched with country music, and it smells like a lot of animals pooping, but it’s also almost worth the drive out here just on its own. 

                And it was enough to satisfy Nadia’s horse cravings – for a while.

We’d told the girls we needed to be on the road by 8:30 if we wanted to keep Devil’s Tower on the itinerary, so that helped get them moving in the morning (Devil’s Tower has Junior Ranger badges!)  We ended up making it by 8:45 – not too bad, considering – and since this was largely because we had to make a stop for ice, we headed for Devil’s Tower, 2 ½ hours away in Wyoming.

Devil’s Tower is awe-inspiring – a huge obelisk of rock thrust up far above anything in the surrounding prairies.  (For people of a certain age, it is most famous for its cameo appearance in the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, where it is carved out of mashed potatoes.)  It’s sheer rock going straight up some unbelievable distance, but we still saw many climbers (tiny, barely visible in the distance) taking it on.

There’s a 1.5 mile trail that leads all around the base, and also includes a few gorgeous overlooks of the surrounding country.  Nadia was very insistent on going to a ranger program (a requirement for the badge), so she and Bob did that while Zoe, Lanie, and I did the hike.  (I think they missed out but a side benefit is that they can now tell you a lot about turkey vultures.)  The bottom of the tower all around is a huge boulder field, where chunks of the tower have fallen off over time.  There’s not much my kids like better than climbing on rocks, and Zoe made it all the way up to the top of the boulders (where the tower proper started).

Once we left Devil’s Tower, we had about a six-hour drive to our final destination in Cody, WY.  It was a beautiful drive through various different kinds of mountain terrain.  One thing I’d never known was that a lot of the ground here is a rich red color, which contrasts nicely with the dark green pines.  We went through very long stretches without seeing any sign of civilization, then we’d come to a sign that would say something like, “Entering town of Buffalo Dung, pop. 24”.  At one point we crossed over a high mountain pass in the Big Horn mountains.  I checked our GPS out of curiosity and found that we’d gained about a mile in elevation (to over 9000) feet, before dropping down to below 4000 feet again.  The scenery was breathtaking but it was a little hard on the poor old minivan.

We stopped for a quick dinner in some town that at least had a population in the hundreds, and Bob wanted to try a new fast food chain he’d been noticing called “Taco John’s”.  Can anyone out there from the west defend this establishment?  We were a little leery when we found that there was not a soul in the restaurant (despite its being 6:30 at night), and quickly lowered our expectations when we read their special, which was a “meat and potatoes burrito” featuring ground beef with little fried hash brown things and ranch dressing.  I mean, we weren’t expecting a gourmet meal but we also didn’t think it would be somewhat less authentic than Taco Bell.

Anyway, we finally made it to Cody around 9, and set off to find our campground where we’d rented a tipi.  The campground was in the middle of the city, so I’d resigned myself that it would be one of those campgrounds that’s essentially a parking lot, and at first that’s what it appeared to be.  But then we followed the map to the back of the campground, and suddenly the road dropped away beneath us into a series of steep switchbacks leading into a deep ravine behind the campground.  There was a rushing creek behind the tepee, and it felt like we were in the wilderness.  (On the down side, there is a major climb involved in getting to a real bathroom, and we’re not 100% sure the loaded-down van will make it back up that hill.  Stay tuned.)

***

From Bob:                                                                                                           

I don’t know that anyone reading this blog has ever experienced anything quite like these tipis.  They are very odd, stuck down in this hole, nicely secluded from the rest of surprisingly-bustling Cody (except the one streetlight I can see over the canyon rim).   I’m not going to say they’re absolutely authentic – for instance, our first Americans seem wise enough not to have covered the ground inside their tipis with gravel.  Also, there is a metal spike right in the middle of the floor that may have something to do with keeping the tipi top open.  Whatever it’s for, it’s not the kind of thing you want to mistake for a pillow.  The tipi sides don’t reach all the way down to the ground, which is strange.  You lie on the ground –  hopefully not too close to the spike – and you can see the feet of people walking by.

                Those things aside, they really seem to aspire for authenticity.  The poles are wooden and the covering is cloth, and there are two big poles connected to flaps at the top.  This must be indigenous air conditioning, but we can’t figure it out.  We can barely figure out how to close the door flap.  This leads me to think they’re pretty authentic.

                Also, we’re right on the banks of a nice rushing stream, a nice departure from all the dryness we’ve experienced so far on this trip.  It makes a nice noise that will help up sleep, I’m sure.  Though it may also make us have to use the porta-potties (we have to climb back up the hill to reach the regular bathroom) overnight, which is not the most pleasant prospect.

Today we made a switch from live animals to animals in their less intimidating fossil form.  The nearby Mammoth Site was a great trip.  It’s located at a prehistoric pond which had steep, slippery sides.  Over the course of hundreds of years, many mammoths and other animals fell in and were unable to get out.  So it’s a treasure trove of fossils, including many giant mammoths.  It’s still an active archeological site, but we were here on a Sunday so no one was working.  I think Disney and the like ruins your brain after a while – looking down at the half-excavated mammoth skeletons, it was very hard to believe it was real.

The highlight was their Junior Archaeologist program.  The group of kids who’d signed up were brought back into another building where there were huge boxes filled with dirt.  They were given an archaeologist’s toolkit and set loose to dig up their own “fossils”.  Nadia immediately hit upon a bear’s leg bone, while Zoe and Lanie took a little longer to discover their finds (mammoth leg bone and mammoth neck vertebrate, respectively).  They all had a grand time and decided to commemorate the occasion by using some of their trip money on Mammoth Site glow-in-the-dark T-shirts.  (Given that this could buy another day’s reprieve from laundry duty, I didn’t object too much to this choice.)

Hard at work

For the afternoon we visited nearby Wind Cave National Park for a picnic lunch then a tour of the cave.  I liked this cave a lot better than Howe Caverns – it seemed more real and the narrow winding passages were more impressive than the larger passageways at Howe.  We were able to enter the cave through the “natural entrance” (OK, this actually turned out to be a revolving door, but at least we didn’t go down through an elevator).  The cave has this beautiful lattice-like formation called boxwork, which is found in few other caves in the world (Wind Cave has 95% of the world’s boxwork, supposedly).

We had a double whammy with the accursed Junior Ranger badges today.  They rushed to complete their Wind Cave ones, but Zoe had to go on a hike to complete hers.  This ordinarily would have been a perfectly enjoyable event, but 

we were really pressed for time so it ended up being her and me racing through the first section of the trail, with me muttering, “Look at the grasses.  Have you found the three kinds you need?” which was probably not the sort of nature experience that those who’d designed the program had in mind.  They had to turn in their Custer State Park booklets tonight too, and Nadia hadn’t gotten around to finishing hers.  Anxiety and tears ensued, but it all ended in a kind ranger giving her the patch on the understanding that she would finish her one last page later.

We drove the wildlife loop one more time on our way back to our campsite – this time we managed to keep Lanie awake (with difficulty), and the girls were prepared for the burros with carrots and broccoli.  (They’d learned that this is the one park animal you’re allowed to feed.)  Once again, without provocation, one of the buggers put its head through my window.  This time I was looking in the opposite direction, at the one Zoe was feeding.  When Bob told me to look behind me, I was expecting to see a buffalo in the distance or something, and jumped about a foot when I found the burro about 6 inches away.  Again, much amusement from the rest of the crew.

This was our last night at Custer, and we tried to pack up what we could since we have a long drive ahead tomorrow.  The one negative is that the drought has led to a campfire ban – a major disappointment to girls with visions of s’mores dancing in their heads.  But they were able to catch one last campfire program before falling exhausted into bed.

 ***

From Bob:

The spectrum of camp lodging spans almost as far as the prairie itself.  Many, many types are on display here.  Our tent would appear to be on the rudimentary end, but we are actually living fairly large in our nylon cocoon.  Along the tent row, we were bordered on one side last night by a pup tent designed for two people – two horizontal people.  At least we can stand up in our tent.   The other neighboring site supported a small village of tents – two low structures and a hammock-like device that could be described as a pup tent suspended between two trees.  I think at least one person slept in that, but I wasn’t spying ardently enough to see.

                Don’t get me wrong, we’re still well to the small side of the spectrum, as evidenced by the fact that Zoe, Nadia and I were able to carry our tent several spaced down the road to our new tents site, which, I guess, is where we were originally supposed to set up when we arrived. 

                Now, we’re in a whole different neighborhood.  Our immediate neighbors are tenters, but they have two tents plus a canopy kind of guy that covers the picnic table and some kitchen furniture they trucked along with them.  This includes a kind of baker’s rack with their cook stove and about a dozen coffee mugs hanging from hooks.  These people have a U-Haul trailer that they carried their camping gear with. 

It spirals up from there.    We’ve seen two or three VW vans.  There are modified pickup trucks and old fashioned, hard-sided pull-behinds.  Pop-up campers seem popular with families similar to ours – those with multiple young kids.  Just looking at the section of this campground that we’ve seen, there appear to be hundreds of varieties of these things. 

Then there are the majestic Land Yachts – huge busses of luxury that we’ve seen rolling across the country for most of our trip out here.  Often they tow SUVs behind them.  Many of these guys have come to roost in Custer State Park.   There are some gleaming examples only a few sites from ours, shiny, smooth-riding and just awesome to behold.  Most seem to be occupied by two people apiece.  Several yachtsmen have brought their own lawn ornaments.  Many have their air conditioning running all day long.   They have their own row in the campground and seem to get along well with each other.

I can only wonder what they think of us, carrying our tent down the road.  They may not see tenters  that often.  We have passed countless campgrounds along our route out west that seem to be parking lots for these things.  Of course, we won’t see the tents would we?  The tents are all in the woods, hidden by trees.  Why are we hidden by trees? you ask.  Shelter.  If one of those yachtsmen fails to set his parking break and they’ll run right over us like a speed bump.  Less than a speed bump, really.

So far, our kids have not expressed a desire for anything but our tent, which is nice.  Of course, they’re not likely to ever talk us into a land yacht. But if they’re not even trying, it means we’re having fun just the way we are. 

We’re staying here in Custer State Park for three days, so it was very nice not to have to pack up this morning.  (Of course, alert readers of yesterday’s entry will recall that in fact we were not in the right campsite.  Luckily, no one arrived late last night to kick us out of our tent, but this afternoon some very nice people arrived with a reservation in hand.  A few phone calls later and we’d figured out where we were supposed to be – the very nice people offered to just switch with us for the night, but we found out we’d have to move for another reservation the following night.  Fortunately this just involved emptying the tent and moving it across the campground.)

Although only a state park, in both scope and scale Custer is really national park-league.  After a healthy camp breakfast (bacon!  And white bread fried in bacon grease!), we set off for a gold-panning activity in a creek near the visitor center.  My kids are always on board for any activity that involves getting wet and/or muddy, and a chance to indulge their acquisitive sides really puts the icing on the cake.  We did not find any gold, but the girls did find several near-microscopic garnets.  Or at least the ranger said they were garnets.

The kids also attended a few other ranger-led events, one of which involved making a faux bag of animal poop using candy.  (They have quite an imagination here.)  Lucky they did, though, because the candy poop bags were able to sustain the girls on our three-mile hike to Lovers’ Leap, a breathtaking cliff high on a ridge.  (We heard some hikers at the visitor center the next day saying they’d run into a large male buffalo at the top of the trail.  We did not have this experience but certainly saw plenty of (non-candy) evidence of their presence.)

 

We drove back to our campsite via the Wildlife Loop, which certainly lived up to its name.  Lanie fell asleep two minutes in and could not be roused, even when a herd of buffalo was literally milling around our car.  Or when a rouge burro came up and stuck his head right in my window, leading to distinct uneasiness on my part and much merriment in the back seat (and driver’s seat too, for that matter).  The buffalo actually stopped traffic for several minutes due to a calf who decided to nurse in the middle of the road.

In the evening we set out for Mt. Rushmore along a “scenic route”.  The route was in fact very scenic, but also rather terrifying — climbing and descending mountain passes through many hairpin turns on an extremely narrow road.  (We both agreed that there was no way we were going back on the same road after dark, even if we had to drive 100 miles out of the way.)  The coolest feature of the road was two cleverly designed tunnels blasted through the rock (though they were also unnerving in their own way, since they were one-lane and blind, and you had to rely on honking your horn before starting through to avoid a head-on collision).  The tunnels themselves through the mountains were pretty neat, but they’d also been designed so that Mt Rushmore came into sight from a distance, with the four heads visible through the end of the tunnel.

Mt. Rushmore was the most crowded place we’ve been so far (which is not a big surprise, since it was Saturday night).  There’s a trail leading around the base of the monument, which lets you get away from the crowds a bit and some good views closer to the monument.  (We also had the inevitable Junior Ranger homework to complete as well.)  We stayed for the 9pm lighting ceremony, and by the time we’d gotten the Junior Ranger badges and gotten out of the clogged parking lot, it was quite late.  We managed to get home on a road that was slightly less “scenic” than the one we’d come in on, and happily all the kids slept all the way back to the campground.

***

From Bob:

Day 8 Our wildlife adventures

To say we stuck around the state park today really sets this off on the wrong foot; we really did a lot.  Just driving from place to place here is adventurous, with lots of ups and downs and twists and turns. Plus you never know what kind of wildlife will be waiting around the next corner. 

Animals are all over the place here.  We saw dozens of deer along the road as we drove in last night. Turkeys and their little baby turks flourish right here in our campground.  There is evidence of buffalo, if you catch my drift, right in the lawn in front of the visitors center. 

But the real way to find animals is to drive around and wait to see a car pulled over.  That’s a fine sign that there’s an animal within viewing distance.  It can be a pronghorn antelope, or a mule deer, prairie dog, or elk.  We’ve seen them all.

Even Buffalo have made an appearance.  This encounter came with the most cars stopped along the road.  Everyone was stopped because the buffalo were in the road.  I couldn’t see what was blocking our path, but a nursing mother and calf were casually occupying the oncoming lane.  Not much farther along the road we were held up by a roving band of semi-wild burros.  Luckily, the girls went to a ranger program last night and learned that the burros tended to stick their heads inside cars in hopes of being fed.  They’re the only animals that guests are allowed to feed, according to the ranger, but you have to feed them vegetables.  When burros eat Doritos their lips turn orange and they lie down in the middle of the road with stomach aches.  This is what our junior naturalists in training have reported to us.

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:

***

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.

 We managed to get on the road by 8:15 today, no thanks to malingering children who’d stayed up too late telling stories the night before.  (Zoe has a whole series going starring the stuffed animals that each of them brought, visiting each place we’ve visited and having misadventures.)  After depressing ourselves along the three-hour drive with The Long Winter, we reached the Ingalls homestead, where this book and a couple of others were actually set. 

This was a pretty cool place.  There was a replica of the Ingalls’ homestead shanty in the exact location where it really existed, which was exciting if you happen to be someone who’s read the books about three times in the recent past.  There were wagon rides, a lesson in a schoolhouse, crafts and activities, the farmland and prairie, and various buildings from the books, including an original claim shanty.  

Eventually we were able to avail ourselves of the mini-golf, though we soon started skipping holes.  Turns out it’s rather time-consuming to mini-golf with three kids who’ve never really done it before and have no idea how to hold a golf club.  So we only played the holes that had fun moving hazards, like the windmill and the clock pendulum, before hitting the pool.  Bob managed a hole in one! We’re so proud.

Later it was on to nearby Effigy Mounds in Iowa.  This is a pretty cool national monument containing a lot of pristine land right on the Mississippi, as well as many ceremonial earth mounds built by Native Americans long ago.   The kids were less thrilled by the mounds than they were by the Junior Ranger program, where they could do various activities to earn a plastic badge.  We went on a beautiful hike and I had to force them to put away their booklets and actually look around. 

The ranger had sized up our crew and recommended a short hike on a wooden boardwalk, but we are more intrepid!  (Plus the girls wanted to see the Little Bear mound so they could check it off on their bingo activity page.)  So we did the 2-mile loop trail past several mounds and leading to an amazing view of the Mississippi.  Of course, the reason the view was so amazing was that it was so high, which meant that the first half of the trail was straight uphill.  Also, did I mention it was over 100 degrees?  Some of the children handled this challenge better than others.  (Hint: Lanie, the four-year-old, was the most energetic and actually ran most of the way back down.)  Nothing ever felt better than going into the cool visitor center and resting their while the girls completed their badge work.

A great deal of effort went into these junior ranger badges

Next, on to Minnesota!  Fortunately our campground, while not especially nice, was right off the highway, so we didn’t have a repeat of the previous night’s debacle.  Also, we arrived before the pool closed – bonus!  And more air conditioners!  Life is good.

***

The states just keep ticking away, brand new states that I’ve never visited before.  Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa, and now Minnesota.  Just so posterity will always know the exact time I entered Minnesota, and all of these other backwater nowhere places, we’re keeping a detailed trip journal with such entries as “[5:45 – Entered Minnesota]”.  Posterity will eat this up.  We’re also tracking time on the road, miles logged and gas consumed.  For those who are interested, the cheapest gas I’ve seen advertised was $3.33 in Pennsylvania, but the cheapest I’ve purchased was $3.43, in New York. 

We’re supposed to be writing some color into the journal as well, but so far it’s mostly just nuts-and-bolts stuff.  We’re trying to keep track of what we’re listening to, as well.   Today we started our third Little House series book of the trip, The Long Winter.  I wanted to skip this one, as it is tremendously depressing and everyone almost starves to death; however, it takes place in DeSmet, which is where we’ll be sleeping – in a covered wagon! – tomorrow night.  Happily, it’s been anything but wintry, so we’re not likely to have in Ingalls flashbacks during our visit; or, if we do, they won’t involve the hard questions of whether we should cannibalize Baby Grace or throw her onto the fire.

Some other people might not be interested in this but some might want to know what I’m reading.  Actually, I haven’t been reading much because it’s been a busy time, but I have had a chance or two to look at Keith Richards’ autobiography on the Kindle.   It’s quite entertaining, particularly because the opening vignette has Keith and Ronny Wood driving cross-country from Memphis to Houston.  How’s that for a parallel to my life right now.  One major difference is that Keith’s car is filled with drugs and alcohol and ours is filled with stuffed animals and snack food.  And snack food wrappers.  And camping gear.  And kids’ clothes.  Keith hasn’t mentioned having any of these things yet.

Great day in Chicago.  We managed to incorporate bunny-feeding (Colleen will probably be finding bits of parsley hidden around her apartment for months to come), an architectural boat tour around the city and Lake Michigan, the zoo (including a carousel, always a favorite), and best of all, designer cupcakes!  There was also riding the bus, which to my children is quite a thrill.  I’m sure the other people on the bus were wondering where the Clampitts came from, listening to them squeal in delight.

Colleen is the best friend ever.  She shared her bunny-studded Chicago lifestyle with us, gave up her bed – actually her whole bedroom – to put us up for the night, and showed us a lot of cool Chicago stuff in just over 24 hours.  My favorite was the Gran Luxe Café, the restaurant just off Michigan Avenue where we ate lunch.  It had vivid, golden-highlighted paintings and elaborate lighting fixtures.  There were Greek-inspired mosaics and Byzantine-like murals.  There was a line of 20 or so people waiting to get in when the doors opened at 11 am.  Also, the food was really good.  I ordered a chipotle-avocado burger, but I got around to trying just about everyone’s stuff, except for Zoe’s pulled pork sliders, which disappeared quickly.

                There were many chances to view the skyline from lots of different angles, including from a boat tour that gave many historical tidbits.  We got to ride the bus like locals.  And Colleen found a fine playground near her place.  The kids could have easily spent hours there, but for the stifling heat.  The next day, rain spoiled our plans to go swimming at one of those beaches on  Lake Michigan that surprised me so much on my way in.  The rain also tamed the heat a little, so our boat ride turned out to be very comfortable.  Second-to-last stop was the Lincoln Park Zoo, another place where we could have spent a lot more time, but Colleen had one more trick up her sleeve for the walk home: cupcakes at a special cupcake shop in her neighborhood. 

                We would do well to have a friend like Colleen in every place we stop, but this was particularly true for the next place we visited, Ed Begley Jr., Wisconsin.   Not even a friend as great as Colleen.  Just  a friend to tell us how to get to our campground.  Some sort of neutral third party.  Unfortunately, the streets of Ed Begley Jr. are rather empty after 9 pm on a Tuesday (I think it was Tuesday).  Also, although we were all excited about adding Wisconsin to our list of states visited, this place has the strange habit of naming perfectly fine road with single letters.   Unfortunately, our campground was on County Road X, a name that will live in infamy in our family for years to come.  Surely it must stand for County Road the Tenth?  No wonder our GPS was so spastic. 

                Truthfully, if the lady in the Ranger Station of the Ed Begley Jr.’s Yogi Bear’s Jellystone Park had just said it’s about a mile past the Wysamooganie State Park and Boat Launch, just a few feet from the (busy) train corridor, we would have been in better shape.  Sadly we were left to look for the road just between County Roads IX and XI. 

                Please, tell us Colleen is waiting for us in Iowa.

After a mile or so the older girls and I arrived at a pristine, empty beach on Lake Erie.  Nothing could keep them out of the water at that point, even though it was overcast and a little drizzly and there were some intimidating warnings about toxic algae.  Lanie soon arrived to swim as well, which meant I had to get into the water, but fortunately it remained very shallow for a long way out.

Eventually we dragged the kids from the beach and went back to the yurt for lunch and to pack up.  We somewhat underestimated the time this would take, especially since a gale force wind had just blown up that proved to be a complicating factor.  It all ended in me frantically riding my bike to the camp office and turning our key in at the stroke of noon (checkout time), while Bob attempted to fit everything back in the car.

It was a long drive to Chicago, but this made it all worthwhile:

It was extremely hot in Chicago (“real feel” of 101 degrees at 10 o’clock at night!).  We walked to the lakefront and a nearby playground, had a delicious dinner with Colleen and her boyfriend Sean and then capped off the night with ice cream.

********

Jen deserves much praise for taking the Chicago leg of the driving  — I was not looking forward to that.  We were aided by a time-zone shift that meant we were entering the city at 3:30 on a Monday instead of 4:30.  Also, I’d like to think I performed admirably as navigator, balancing the GPS directions vs. the Google printed directions and even a construction detour.

                The best part, though, was that I got to focus on Chicago and not the people shifting into our lane without signaling.  I otherwise might not have noticed how beautiful a city it is.   Nothing had ever given me the impression that this was a beach community, yet as we sped in on Lakeshore Drive I could see Mediterranean blue Lake Michigan water – with people actually swimming in it, and boats, and a long strip of beach with lots of sun bathers, and cabana-bars with umbrella tables.   This was not at all what I expected.

                It did not hurt that this region is in the middle of a record heat wave, so that might have sent more people than usual to the shoreline.  Also, Chicago does not get a lot of competition from the metropoles of Gary, IN, and Toledo, both of which we drove through to get here.  But from first impressions right down to the details of Colleen’s cool neighborhood, Chicago is enchanting.