It’s been a fun trip so far. South Dakota was… boring east of the Missouri River. Flat, dull and boring. West of the Missouri, the hills are rolling, the Wall Drug billboards pick up a bit more and eventually, you stumble upon the Badlands. Ahhh… the Badlands, I have to admit that I’ve fallen in love with them. They’re remarkably pretty even when they’re imposing. I’ll be stopping again on my way back at the end of the summer.

The Minuteman Missile National Monument was not really all that impressive. We couldn’t get tickets to go into the Launch Control Center (I’m still annoyed that there are so few tours available). The silo there wasn’t all that impressive. It’s welded open with a big glass structure over it so you can look down into it. If it’s sunny, forget it, the glare is so bad you can hardly see that there’s anything inside. I will admit that the park rangers there are very knowledgeable and have gone out of their way to research the program’s history.

Really, the better thing to do (which we did) was drive to Ellsworth Air Force Base by Rapid City and go on the tour offered by the South Dakota Air and Space Museum, which takes you down into a missile silo.

Mount Rushmore was so-so, Jewel Cave was amazingly beautiful, Wind Cave National Park was gorgeous (I didn’t go down into the cave, just the surface park), and Needles Highway is one of the most scenic pieces of road I’ve driven on.

P.S. Wall Drug is the biggest tourist trap ever.

This morning I left South Dakota under a cover over rain that followed me through Wyoming and into Colorado. A stop at the Colorado Welcome Center changed my plans from going immediately to Rocky Mountain National Park, now, I’ll be spending the next couple days in Denver and Colorado Spring.

So, tonight, I’ve got a pile of literature, a bunch of photos from South Dakota, a desk and a bed. Before using the latter piece of furniture, it’s my intention to sort through the literature, make plans for the next two days and start uploading my photos from the last week.

Travel Distance: 367 miles

Overall, today was a pretty leisurely day, which was nice compared to the whirlwind of the previous 6 days. Kevin left at about 7am this morning to head back to Iowa and work, leaving me without a solid agenda moving forward, several gigabytes of photos that I’ve taken and not culled, processed and uploaded yet and a book that I’d started the previous days. I decided to tackle this in order of importance and once I set my book down, finished, at 1:30 in the afternoon, it was time to call AT&T and cancel the service in my old apartment which I’d forgotten about until today.

Half an hour on hold with AT&T left me with a pretty decent plan and my next stop will be Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado instead of my prior plan to head for Devil’s Tower in Wyoming. Satisfied with my progress so far for the day, I headed a few miles north to drive the Needles highway inside South Dakota’s Custer State Park ($5 entrance fee for a week pass, good at any SD state park).

It was definitely an interesting drive, I’ve got a decent prong-horn photo lying about on a compact flash card now along with a photo of a mule deer that might turn out reasonably okay. This whole trip however, I haven’t gotten any bird photos. In fact, the only birds I can even recall seeing are 2 brace of vultures at the Badlands. Obviously, I’m doing something wrong. Oh, and of course I’ve got what I hope will be some neat photos of the rock formations along the highway.

Like about half the nights since I’ve gotten to South Dakota, it’s been raining again. Right now I’m sacked out in the car attempting to work on photos while I’m waiting to see if the rain will slacken up enough to pitch my tent tonight or if I’ll be spending a night in the Jeep for the first time.

Travel Distance: 65 miles

Well, the inclement weather never materialized, which I suppose is a good thing – though after spending the night in a hotel room in order to avoid it, the lack of bad weather was a let-down. After an 8am continental breakfast, we hit the road, picked up Kevin’s car and headed for Mt. Rushmore.

After a fiasco I had paying for parking (Traveler’s Note: Parking at Mt. Rushmore is $10 and they only take cash.), Kevin and I spent about an hour and a half at Rushmore. To be honest, yeah, they’re pretty huge faces and it’s a wonder of engineering to have them sculpted into the rock, but… well, as Kevin and I had discussed since getting to South Dakota, there are only two things in the state… National Parks and tourist traps. To be frank, I think we both got more excited by the mountain goat we saw than by the mountain.

Back into the cars for the drive over to Jewel Cave and since we had a few hours to kill before we could take our tour (Traveler’s Note: None of the tours are free, even if you hold the annual pass to get you into all the Natl. Parks.), the Scenic Tour, we fired up the camp stove for some lunch, dried out our tent from the thunderstorm our last night/morning in the Badlands and got harangued by an elderly ranger for eating ramen noodles.

I would highly recommend this tour to anyone passing through the area. It’s about half a mile long and mostly steps, but the cave is phenomenal and well worth the exertion. The path is paved and the stairs are metal, so don’t fear that you’ll be crawling around in the cave. The tours lasts about an hour and a half and you’ll learn quite a bit.

After finishing up the tour, we headed to Wind Cave National Park to get our backcountry camping permit (free camping is the way to travel!), hiked in, set up our tent (so we didn’t have to do it in the dark) and headed back to Mount Rushmore for the lighting ceremony. Again, we left unimpressed by the program (the ranger giving the introductory speech to a video basically repeated, word for word, the first 5 minutes of the video). I should have some decent pictures of Rushmore lit at night though.

A final trip back to Wind Cave and a rather arduous hike into the backcountry and over the top of a steep hill later, we were in bed.

Travel Distance: 165 miles

Well, to say the least, it’s been an interesting day. Due to a rather severe (and long) thunderstorm overnight, we didn’t get up to take photos of the sunrise this morning like we had planned. Frankly, there wasn’t really a sunrise as the storm raged through night and early morning. Around 6:30-7am, the storm calmed enough that we could get out of the tent and break down without getting the interior of the tent soaked as well. A quick breakfast, and we were on our way out of the Badlands to the Minuteman National Historic Site visitor center next to the Badlands Trading post off I-90.

Upon arriving, we quickly discovered that both tours of the control facility were booked for the day. (There are only two, one at 9:00am and one at 1:30pm – we were told that reservations have to be made well in advance… you’d think with something apparently so popular, they could have more than two tours a day. I’ll grant them that Tuesday is an open house, but still, I don’t see a logical reason they can’t offer more tours, especially since Tuesday isn’t convenient for a lot of people (Kevin and I included). I did however get to speak to a National Park Service volunteer who has a son who is a math teacher and has taught in 8 different countries. (I swear, everyone I talk to either knows someone living in bush Alaska or teaches somewhere unusual. It’s a great conversation starter.)

We took a trip out to the control facility anyways, even though we couldn’t get through the gate, we took a few photos through the fence, we’ll see how those turn out once I get into processing. Then it was a small trip up I-90 to the missile silo location, where we got to see what one of the actual silos looked like. Luckily for Kevin and I, the park ranger who was telling us about the silos mentioned that Ellsworth Air Force Base has a training silo that has public tours.

Kevin and I hit the road again, bound for Ellsworth, armed with my Military dependent’s ID card and no idea how to go about arranging a tour. So, I did what I normally do when I’m in these situations, I called up my brother who is in the Air Force and found out that he has a friend who was/is stationed at Ellsworth. Though, by the time he was able to get back to me, we had stumbled upon the South Dakota Air and Space Museum and had just heard a loudspeaker announcement telling us to buy tickets for the Ellsworth AFB tour if we wanted to see the silo. (Thanks anyways though Scott!)

A few hours later, and many, many frames of historic airplanes later, Kevin and I hit the road to Rapid City in order to find some food before continuing on to Mount Rushmore and Wind Cave. Right after Kevin rolled through a car wash that is.

Well… to put it more accurately, I headed for Rapid City and unbeknown to me, Kevin pulled over at the entrance to the I-90W on-ramp due to a horrible metal-on-metal sound coming from his front, driver-side tire. Thirty seconds down the road, I’m in construction and don’t realize for a few minutes that Kevin isn’t behind me. My phone was working by this point (must have gotten wet the night before – my keypad had stopped functioning) and my first call went straight to voicemail. I actually make it to Rapid City before I get through and find out what the situation is. A 10 mile drive back and Kevin and I have an hour wait before the tow truck arrives (or as one billboard we passed a few hundred miles before proclaimed, the “toe truck”).

Into Rapid City we go, to one of the two Subaru dealerships in the entire state (they’re both located at extreme ends of the state – good thing this didn’t happen in the middle of the state) to find out that the car wash had dislodged some mud and stone and a stone had gotten caught between the rotor and a piece of metal meant to protect the rotor. While they’re fixing that, we head out to find food (our first since the morning) at a nearby sports bar. While there, we find out that there’s a severe thunderstorm watch in effect with a nearby town reporting golf-ball size hail.

Deciding that camping in that would be… painful, I call billeting to find out that they’re full for the night. So, we ponied up the money for a hotel room and managed to pick the most expensive Super 8 either of us has ever run across on Tower Rd. in Rapid City. Our luck didn’t stop there as Rapid City apparently has no night life on a Monday evening. So, we went and saw the new Narnia movie, Prince Caspian, which wasn’t really all that bad, certainly not as bad as I feared it could be. And guess what… as of 12:48am, no hail or thunderstorms.

In the morning, Mount Rushmore, Wind Cave and who knows what else. To close, a picture of Kevin and I, along with a B-1B Lancer at the South Dakota Air and Space Museum.

Travel Distance: 130 miles