Rugged, Beautiful South Dakota

9/4 - 9/5/2019 - Welcome, MN to Plankinton, SD, (202 miles), 1 night at Hill’s RV Park, $25
9/5 - 9/8/2019 - Plankinton, SD to Interior, SD, (188 miles), 3 nights at Badlands Motel and Campground, $36.90/day
9/8 - 9/12/2019 - Interior, SD to Hermosa, SD, (84 miles), 4 nights at Heartland RV Park, $22/day

18 years ago, the last time we came to South Dakota, there was a giant sandstorm the first night we stayed in the Badlands, and there was a forest fire in the Black Hills.  I was surprised Bill even agreed to try it again.

This year, they’ve had the wettest summer in years, so no drought.  The daytime highs ranged from 90 to 70 degrees Fahrenheit, and the nights were cool and refreshing.  The Badlands are forever changing, depending on the time of day and the weather. Around each curve there was a new view to discover of the formations.  Sometimes they leaned toward a warm color palette with layers of reds, beiges and ochre.  Sometime the light pulled out the purples and grays.

One day, we took the 67- mile scenic drive through the park, stopping frequently to explore the overlooks and trails.  Up on Hwy 90, we had to visit Wall Drugstore.  It’s a fun tourist trap - a block long maze of stores, restaurants and oddities.  They advertise along the highway with billboards at every exit.  Their claim to fame is “free ice water”.  As we were finishing the loop, we saw a 10ft tall concrete prairie dog advertising that you could feed them.  So we did.  We bought bags of raw peanuts from the souvenir shop and carefully walked into the field, trying not to step in a hole or on a rodent.  The prairie dogs closest to the store were obese and eager to be fed.  They ran right up to us, wagged their tail and chattered until we fed them.  The ones at the far end of the field were much slimmer and shyer, but they could still be coaxed out of their holes.  Before we knew it we were surrounded!

That’s really all there is to the Badlands, so we moved to the Black Hills, about 88 miles away.  Bill was most interested in seeing Mt. Rushmore, so we drove through the cute little town of Keystone (think Keystone XL pipeline) and paid to park at Mt. Rushmore before we realized that a huge portion of the park is being renovated.  You couldn’t get close.  There was one very long trail that you could walk to get to the base and that was it.  Of course the cafe and ice cream parlor were still open.  FYI - to get better views of the presidents, take the Norbeck Scenic Byway that connects Rushmore to Custer State Park along Iron Mountain Road.  It was designed with overlooks and carved tunnels that frame the sculpture.  It’s a great drive with lots of “S” curves, wooden bridges and switchbacks that reminded us of the Runaway Mine Train at Disney.  We drove it twice.  We also took the 61-mile scenic drive through Custer State Park, and thankfully got to see some of their 1300 bison up close.  They are North America’s largest land mammals.  This time, we stayed in our car.

All-in-all it was a much better visit.  I’m so impressed by the variety of biomes in one state, from the other-worldly sedimentary formations of the Badlands, to the lush National Grassland, to the forested granite Black Hills.  As we left South Dakota, we even caught a glimpse of snow-capped mountains, our next adventure on our journey to the Pacific Ocean.  Wish us luck!

Laying low in Minnesota

8/28 - 9/4/2019 - Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin  to Welcome, Minnesota (288 miles) 7 nights at Checker RV Park, $155.50 for the week.

We stayed the week in Welcome, MN, only a few miles from the Iowa border, to wait out the Labor Day weekend.  It’s a small park, surrounded by, surprise, corn fields, alternating with soy beans.  The days were cool and the nights were downright chilly for this Texas girl.

Bill is a huge fan of the Little House on the Prairie TV series and we were only an hour and a half from Walnut Grove.  So we took a lovely drive through the corn fields and farms to the tiny town.  Really all that’s there is the railroad, a restaurant called Nellies, which doesn’t look at all like the one on the show, a post office, bank and the Laura Ingalls Wilder museum.

Now, I’m not as familiar with the show.  I watched it when I was a kid, but Bill used to watch it while eating lunch, when I was teaching. I thought I might read the books to get caught up, and just couldn’t get through Little House in the Big Woods.  So I did some research and found that Pa moved his family, a lot!  They lived on “the prairie” in Kansas in the early 1870s when Laura was very young.  They moved to Plum Creek and lived in a dirt dugout home near Walnut Grove in the mid-1870s.  After three years of  crop failure, they moved again in the late 1870s to De Smet, South Dakota.  That’s as far as I got.  I love that so many young girls cut their teeth on these books that are based on Laura’s life, and are essentially early reader historical fiction - my favorite genre.

We’ve gotten to where we like Pick Your Own places, and Bill really wanted to pick some corn - because it was all around us.  Now, being from Texas,  you don’t trespass because you might get shot.  So Bill found Timberlake orchard that had just opened for the season the day before. When we visited, they didn’t have a lot of apples yet, so we asked the owner if he had any corn to pick.  He did!  He walked with us and answered all our city slicker questions.  Here’s what we found.  Corn and soy beans are not just grown for human consumption, like vegetable oil, edemame and corn flakes.  Over 50% is sold to foreign countries.  Lots of corn is used to feed livestock.  Lots of both are used for biofuel.  There was a Valero plant just across the road that filled never-ending train tankards that ran all hours of the day and night (what is it with RV parks and railroads!).  BTW- like the cherries in Door County, everything is about two weeks late coming in.  The farmers were waiting for a few more warm days before they harvested.

I love that our country is not all concrete and glass and some places are still in tune with the earth and the seasons.  These are the things you don’t see when you live in urban areas.  For this stop, I’m using my farmers market find as my regional foods.  Here’s a look at what we got from the bounty of Minnesota.