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

Kevin and I started the morning by breaking camp at the wonderful hour of 4am. The night before, we parked on a little used road, grabbed our gear and hiked out into the Badlands to set up camp. The park required us to be half a mile from any road or trail and not visible from roads or trails. Considering that we set up at dusk, and broke down before dawn, I’d say we fulfilled at least part of those requirements…

We attempted some star trail photos before we went to bed last night. Basically, we set our cameras up on the tripods at the top of the bowl we were camping in, set an alarm for 45 minutes and crawled in, waking up to collect our gear. I wasn’t really happy with the result, but didn’t want to stay up the entire night and hike the few miles it would take to get a truly awesome shot (‘ll post it at the end of this post). Kevin… well, his camera battery died sometime during the exposure. Since I think I’ll be coming back through South Dakota at the end of my trip, another stop at the Badlands will be in order to complete my vision and take a few shots we didn’t get on our first trip.

After our sunrise photos, we took a couple short hikes to scout some locations and grabbed a half-hour nap in the visitor center’s parking lot until they opened so we could poke around. There were a couple cute exhibits… nothing terribly exciting, but we did learn a little bit about geology while we were there.

A drive all the way through the north section of the park, through a herd of bison, led to Sage Creek campground where we could throw up our tent to dry out and catch a bit of a nap in the car. After that… well, we decided to let ourselves get caught by South Dakota’s biggest tourist trap, Wall Drug.

Now Wall Drug… there simply is no way to describe this place except as a tourist trap. It’s absolutely huge, seems to be composed of what is actually 10-15 smaller stores, and we didn’t even venture into “the backyard”. Regardless, Kevin bought a toy bow and arrow set as part of a work gag and I found myself a hat…

Yeah… I bought a Stetson. A wool Stetson that is crushable, but a Stetson nonetheless. Did I mention this place is a tourist trap? The… mannequin there to have your picture taken with should really be a dead giveaway. And yeah… Kevin posed there too:

Having whored ourselves out enough, we headed back to the Badlands… to find that our nice direct light of the morning had become diffused due to cloud cover. We didn’t despair however and headed into the park, tried some light hiking and waited it out. Sure enough, it cleared and we got in a couple hours of hiking and photography before it rolled back in for the evening. Dinner at the Cedar Pass Lodge (the park’s restaurant) was horrid – I don’t think I’ve ever actually sat and eaten food that tasted that bad in a restaurant before and left the two of us wishing we’d taken the time to find somewhere out of the rain that had started to fall to cook something.

Back through the entire park, pausing to take pictures along the way (including some great shots of bighorn sheep climbing the rocks) brought us back to the Sage Creek campground shortly after sunset (8:30ish this time of year) were we sacked out around 9am for an long and enjoyable night’s sleep.

And finally, the star trail pictures (expect a big picture sometime soon when I can find somewhere with an electrical outlet and an internet connection for long enough to do some post-processing and uploading.

Well, I’m sitting in Badlands National Park waiting for the stars to come out. We got here shortly before sunset, so there wasn’t much in the way of photos tonight. However, my tripod is set up right now and I’m just waiting for more stars to come out in order to take some star trail photos, which should turn out amazingly given the fantastic scenery.

Our alarms are set for 4am so that we can break camp and be in place for some 5am sunrise photos. Hopefully I’ll be able to update again tomorrow night from the park with pictures. Current plans are to be in the Badlands Sunday and Monday.

Travel Distance: 656 miles

Spent the day hanging out with a couple friends from college. Betsy took me about 20 miles south of Cedar Rapids to a tourist attraction town called Amana, which was founded by German settlers in the 1850s. A brewery, a few small wineries and several small shops dominate the downtown district. Sadly, they allow cars through the downtown area, which does much to spoil the “old town” feeling they are attempting to cultivate.

After returning to Cedar Rapids and hooking up with Kevin, I called in the steak dinner he owes me and we’re now closing out a night of making plans, catching up and playing video games. In the morning, Kevin and I will hit the road for the Badlands and several other sights in South Dakota, Mount Rushmore, Crazy Horse and a couple caves.

Travel Distance: 48 miles