Week 5, Part 1 - The Dakotas!

Week 5, Part 1

Leaving Windom, MN on the 10th was our longest day driving up to that point - 6 hours = 8/9 car hours! I stopped and bought Milo a bigger crate, hoping it would get him to stop meowing. Nope. Just changed the frequency from every 2 seconds to every minute. I'll take it. We were now in North Dakota, and officially in the Great Plains! I saw buffalo from the highway, and a sunflower field! I had known I would see buffalo, but the sunflower field was a great surprise! Turns out that North Dakota was covered in sunflower fields, and that I had arrived just as they were opening up!! That night we arrived at a tiny park in Medina and I got my first taste of the dark night skies.

On the 11th we finished the drive along the boring, flat, straight road that cut across North Dakota, finally making it to the North Unit of the Theodore Roosevelt National Park. It was $25 for a week pass into the park, and another $14 a night for a site with no hookups, but who cares! I was in the Badlands, and they were incredible! I'm not even sure how to describe them... it was like driving in to a mountainous canyon, painted in so many different colors of rock, with a mix of prairie lands and trees. Soon after entering the park I passed a sign warning that Buffalo were dangerous and to stay at a distance, causing me to squeal in delight and eagerly scan my surroundings for one! I had read reviews for Juniper campground where the buffalo walked within the sites, and it was the reason I was staying inside the park grounds. I was so excited! While I didn't end up seeing one in the camping area, I did see a lot!
Later than afternoon I was walking on a trail when I first saw one, about 75 feet away from me. I watched him roll around, kicking dirt onto himself like he was giving himself a dirt bath 😃Afterwards, he stood up and took a step towards me and I booked it out of there! Before seeing him I had hiked to a "Prairie Dog Town" about a mile into the Badlands. I had seen the ranger on my way in who had warned me of a bunch of bison cakes, or something. Once I started walking I soon realized he was talking about their poop! It's huge! Easily 3 times the size of my foot! So avoiding those, I wound my way along the rocky path. I actually heard the prairie dogs squeaking before I got to their "town"! When I did get there, they got very quiet, and ran into their holes. As I walked further, the ones I had passed would pop back out of the ground and call out to the others. At one point about 5 or 6 of them came out and stood on their hind legs, all facing the same direction, frozen still and staring dead ahead, almost like a nighttime prayer.
Anyways, after I left them, and after I saw my first buffalo, I drove to the first overlook. It didn't matter where you were; high, low, where ever - it was beautiful from every perspective. At the overlook the ranger was there again, talking to a group of men in animal costumes.. At first I thought they were doing something for the park guests, but found out that they were from the UK and were taking pictures at parks, dressed in $2000 animal suits, for fun. Just for something to do! Only one of them took his head piece off to talk to us, while the others stayed masked; the animal eyes watching you from every angle. It was really unsettling! A storm was off in the distance, so I left that odd situation to finish the drive to the last overlook.
On the way there was a herd of buffalo, right on the side of the road!! 3 other cars were stopped, so I got out and took some awesome photos! I even walked with one, about 10 feet away, until he noticed and I got freaked out. They are so incredibly big!!! On my way back from the overlook they were blocking the road!! Who cares about traffic when it is caused by a herd of buffalo setting the speed limit!? It was amazing. They were only feet away from me, not even caring that I was slowly following behind and beside them! It was, without a doubt, one of the coolest experiences I have ever had.
When I finally made it back to my site, the storm that had been lurking had finally caught up to me. I had driven out to this specific area to see the meteor shower happening that night, and only afterwards learned about the wandering buffalo. It wasn't until I got there that I realized what an amazing place the badlands were, so needless to say, I was hardly upset that I missed the shower.

On the 12th I ended up in Medora, a tourist town near the South Unit. I was looking for a rodeo when I stumbled upon the town, lined with Saloons and gift shops, all in the classic Western design. So being that I'm more into bars than rodeos (even more so when they're called Saloons!!), I decided to stop in. The one I went to even had the swinging doors to enter! Inside there was a big bar, wooden tables, and a velvet dining room. Seriously, the walls were lined with red velvet, and there were big, heavy, red velvet drapes pulled to either side. On the ceiling there were hundreds, if not thousands, of one dollar bills tacked to the beams, accompanied by old cowboy hats. Some of the bills were written on but not easy to read, and some of the hats were dated. The service and the food sucked, but the place was awesome! I also met these 2 older guys who bought me a beer for my travels! Afterwards I went to get ice cream and it had started pouring which quickly turned to hail! In August! That night the skies cleared up pretty well, so I woke up at 3am and walked into the dark to watch the second night of the meteor shower. I saw maybe 15-20 before heading back to bed.

I only slept a few more hours before waking up Sunday morning to leave for South Dakota. It was a long drive, through a whole lot of the same. I took the Enchanted Highway, a road otherwise so small and unimportant that it had never been named until a local artist began making large sculptures to bring tourists along and into their town. They were interesting, and certainly broke up the otherwise plain scenery, but also a little creepy. In fact, they got weirder the further I drove, until it ended with a tin family sculpture. But I'm sure it accomplished what he had sought out to do - bring tourists down that road - because there I was, driving along just to see the sculptures!
It was a really long drive, and when I realized I only had about 100 miles left on my tank, I found out that the closest gas station was 80 miles away. When I got down to 30 left and 20 to go, I started getting nervous. When I hit 15 miles left on my tank, I was hardly using any gas at all! Downhill or uphill, I didn't change. Every mile that went by I watched to see if I got a full mile out of it for what it said I had left, thinking I was surely going to end up walking a few miles! Luckily we rolled into the gas station with 5 miles left! Being in the middle of nowhere, the gas was $3 a gallon, but I didn't care. I filled up all $98 worth, not wanting to get stuck like that again!
Finally we made it to Whitetail Campground, only to find the review online of it being free was false, and in fact they even charged $2 per pet! (I left Milo out of it!) Not expecting this, I had to backtrack to Hill City to get cash, but luckily the camp host let me leave the camper on a site. I had traveled up a mountain to get to the site, and did not want to tow all the way back down, and back up again! Hill City was a very cute town, just one strip, again in the classic Western styles. I got dinner at a saloon and listened to a group of bikers with the thickest Texan accents talk about Sturgis, a week long biker convention in Sturgis, SD. It had ended that day, and we actually drove through the town but everything was closing up, so we hadn't seen much.

On Monday, the 14th, I got up early to go see Mount Rushmore. It really wasn't that impressive, just looked like every picture I've ever seen, except now I was the one taking the picture! I drove up to see Crazy Horse as well, but didn't pay to go into the park area. I had to be off our site by 1pm and had been planning on driving an hour to a free site, but I had already seen everything I had came for! So instead I packed up and hit the road for Nebraska, stopping at Carhenge along the way. Basically it is a bunch of old cars, painted gray, sticking in the ground by their front or end. Not something I would drive to Nebraska to see, but it was cool!
I had some trouble finding our site in Bayard, it was only 5 electric and water boxes near the city park, but I got there just before a storm hit. The other camper came over and started pointing to the sky, saying how bad it looked, pointing to swirls in a greenish cloud, talking about tornadoes! He told me I would hear the siren, and when I did I needed to go lay in a ditch! As soon as he left I called Amber, rattling off my location like a crazy person feeling like I was about to die. Luckily there was no tornado! Actually there was hardly a storm and it was clear in 10-15 minutes... When I called Amber back, she said, "Yeah, I figured there wouldn't be". As if that's something she could've "figured" from Connecticut!

The next day I drove to Colorado, a bonus that I had acquired from skipping out on my second night in South Dakota. Check out Week 5, Part 2 to read about it!