Tuesday June 26, 2012

Happy Anniversary to us!  Today is our 47th anniversary – it seems like yesterday.  After the usual routine of shower, breakfast, teeth brushing and gassing the truck, we got on the road at 8 this morning.  We were very thankful that we did not have to drive as far today.  Dave took his last antibiotic – he came down with bronchitis on Friday before the trip and stayed in bed all day.  Each day since then he has felt better and better.  Today he was almost back to normal.  We drove north towards Sioux Falls for an hour and then hooked a left (west) across South Dakota.  We continued to see corn for another 100 miles or so, but gradually we came upon rolling grasslands.  I was able to tell the boys that this is where the phrase “amber waves of grain” came from.  The boys felt lucky to see several flatbed trucks carrying the long blades for the wind turbines – they couldn’t believe how huge they were up close.  They spotted an enormous metal sculpture of a longhorn steer on a hillside – it was an advertisement for an outdoor sculpture garden.  We saw many bales of rolled hay and grain silos as far as the eye could see into the distance.  As we approached the Badlands, we could see that even the grasslands disappeared and the mesas and hills were bare white and orange rock.  We will come back to hike here on another day.  We also saw the 500 or so signs for Wall Drug, which we chose not to visit as we made that mistake in 1985 when we took our kids out west.  We stopped for lunch in a real old fashioned diner and everyone enjoyed his meal.  Not long after stopping for lunch and gas, we ran through another time zone change.  We are now in Mountain time and two hours later than in Mystic*.  We finally got to Rapid City and turned down towards our campground in Custer State Park.  It is very big and we had to drive at least a half hour from the gate to get to our North Stockade campground.  We saw several buffalo and two pronghorn antelopes on the way to camp.  The kids were amazed at how large the buffalo are.  We have a very lovely site and spent a hot afternoon setting up camp.  As we were driving through the Badlands, the thermometer in the car got up to 110 degrees!  It had “cooled” to 96 by the time we got to camp.  It was so hot that there must have been a great temperature differential between the outside and inside as at one point, ice cubes came shooting out of the air vent in the front!  It was quite startling and funny!  Alex, Dan and I went to the camp grocery store to pick up a few things for dinner, breakfast and lunch.  Our original intention was to drive back to Rapid City to do a big shopping for the week, but by the time we finished setting up camp, no one felt like driving all the way back to the store.  The camp store was disappointing.  Most gas station convenience stores carry more – but we did get hot dogs and chips for dinner, milk for breakfast (we brought a loaf of banana bread from home), and lunch fixings.  Hopefully, we can get to a bigger store tomorrow.  Theo helped with cooking tonight and Alex and Dan did the dishes.  We will rotate chores for each of the meals.  Everyone is happy to be out of the truck and settled into camp.  We are all working on our journals now while it is still light.  We will stop soon to call Nathaniel and wish him a happy birthday.  * Okay, I can’t believe we did that!  We called Nathaniel at what we thought was his dinnertime and it was 10 minutes to 10 – way past his bedtime!  Obviously, it is two hours earlier here than at home.  It is still very light and warm out so we will read and explore the camp a bit before settling in for the night.