I'm pretty sure they're all hibernating?

On to the Badlands! In only twice the driving time, via the Indian Reservation. Ooops.


After we left Mt. Rushmore I left my job as navigator to drive for Troy, who was getting sleepy. I had already plotted out the route, to be fair, so we were headed in the wrong direction anyway. But if Troy were driving I think he would have caught on much sooner that we seemed to be heading into nowhere and taking a very long time doing so. But he was sleeping in the passenger seat. I finally woke him up and asked him to check the map for me. And then there was kind of a panic moment when we realized that we were miles and miles south of where we needed to be, on an Indian Reservation, which would soon turn into miles and miles of bad dirt roads.

I put the 4-Runner in 4 wheel drive. I don't think we could have done it in my Corolla, which is what we drove on our first trip to the Badlands, years ago. And pretty soon Troy was thinking my out-of-the-way route was pretty cool. Whew! Half of the Badlands National Park is managed by the Lakota Oglala tribe, but eventually we were on federal land.

There were Bison and Prairie Dogs to enjoy in the beginning.







Seriously, those prairie dogs are soo CUTE! And they sound like little squeak toys.

And then there were canyons and ravines and gullies and hoodoos and spires and mounds.
Looks like the Grand Canyon in some places and the Moon in others.











And we drove all around the park. And around, and around. Here we are looking at fossils of animals found in the park. And it got to the point where Troy was asking "Want to stop for pictures here?" and we were like ".......meh."

Troy still finds it all captivating and wants to take more pictures, but while it was already chilly and windy, it had turned off cloudy as well. Troy thought the scenery might photograph better in black and white. Which I think is true if there are human subjects in the picture as well, but not necessarily of the scenery itself.



I don't know, it's nice to have both I guess. But anyway, the problem was, he had never studied the camera before to learn how to do black and white. But he accidentally stumbled across it one day and did it before, so why on earth couldn't he remember it now? And then he was frustrated. And I was thinking about how different we are because I could never just drop everything else in the middle of touring the park to figure out how to set the darn camera for black and white. I would have just said "Well, I guess I should have thought of that before we left." and mooooved on.

And then I was thinking how frustrated and tired we all seemed to be, and we'd had a really great tour of the park, and how nice it would be to get checked into a hotel and go eat.

Right about that time, Troy pulls over and exclaims that there is a hiking trail right in front of us and we are going to do it! And we all whine. But Troy says "We are not just going to look at the Badlands, We are going to LIVE the Badlands!" And we all whine. But we follow. Like sheep. When we hike, sometimes it's a half a day thing, and that's what I was thinking about. That it was late and I didn't know how much food we had with us and I just never know about Troy. He's kind of a wild card.

But the girls warmed up to the idea early into the hike, I didn't come around until much later. But I did come around. And really, it was what we needed.







And when we got back in the car to continue on we discovered that this was basically the end of the park. So we would have left the park tired and grouchy had we not stopped to hike. As opposed to just tired.

We drove on through as much of South Dakota as we could before heading back down into Nebraska. We ended up in Winner. Pheasant capitol of the world. And they do just hurl themselves at you as you're driving down the highway. Nothing sounded better to us than Pizza Hut, and we were in luck because there was one just down the road from the Buffalo Trail Motel, where we were staying. And the next morning we set off for home because, ONCE AGAIN, we had accomplished everything on our vacation to do list in the allotted time. We are awesome!