The Last Days

Friday was the day we had to check out of our awesome rental house.

We debated on whether to find somewhere else to stay in South Dakota before going home or just get moving since I had to work Monday morning. I wanted to find somewhere to stay but James was the voice of reason saying it would be really nice to be able to have a day at home to unpack before going back to work. We decided to check out a few more things in the area before heading toward home. We got everything packed up in the car and then went to breakfast at the same place we went on Wednesday in the town of Custer. This time I had the acai bowl and James had pancakes. Then we ordered some pastries to go.

Bear Country was about half an hour from Custer in Rapid City. I had gone there when I was probably 7 which I had assumed was right after they opened but actually they’ve been around for 50 years. There is a big entrance where a guy met us and told us what animals they have there now and where to find them. They also have an area at the end (with the gift shop of course) where you walk around and see other animals that are in smaller enclosures. They have window cleaner there by the entrance because you aren’t allowed to open anything while driving through, which makes sense. The guy said if the animals smell food they can come up and break your window and since we had pastries in the car we didn’t push it.

The reindeer were first up and they were cute. They all looked like they had little shoes on their feet. Then we passed by some sheep and elk. I couldn’t get a good shot of the elk but I do have a few of the sheep. These were males so they had the full curled horns unlike the ones we saw at the Badlands.

There was one mountain goat as well. It was in a pen by itself and didn’t seem to mind. While we were driving around I saw his enclosure coming up and this big goat on a rock in the center. For about 10 min I thought this was a statue since it didn’t move at all but turns out, that was the goat. It did finally move but not by much. I guess he likes his perch there above everyone else. He even kind of sits at the top of a little incline so he can really stare out over everyone. They also had some large cats but they were behind a fence for safety.

They keep the bears toward the end and they had so many! There were black and brown bears. They didn’t have any cubs in this area. The other animals had babies like the sheep and the buffalo. I think the guy at the front said there was one other newborn there but I can’t remember which animal it was. Anyway, the bears were so cute. They were just roaming around all over the place. At one point we had one lumbering after our car. He wasn’t menacing or anything, I think he was just going that direction. We came up on a big traffic jamb in this area. To be fair there was a lot to look at and one of the bears was taking a bath so I kind of think everyone was stopped there to see it.

The buffalo and antelope were at the end. I didn’t get any good pictures of those either. The antelope were pretty far away and we had seen a lot of buffalo in the wild already. So we parked and went around the walking area. They don’t allow any pets (even service animals) in this area so they don’t interact with the caged animals. Only a few of the pens were fully enclosed, most were just fenced in and I think if something caught their attention they could get out.

They had wolves, bear cubs, prairie dogs, and otters in this section. They were all adorable. Two of the bear cubs were sleeping in a tree and the one kept yelling like it couldn’t figure out how to get back down. The other one sleeping finally woke up and got down the tree and then the little sad one followed his lead.

After seeing these little fur balls we got back on the road. When we were in the Badlands, James wanted to go to this kind of off road trail he had heard about, but we didn’t have time. So we decided to go and give it a try.

It is called Sheep Mountain Table Road. Anyone can drive about half way down it and then you hit a sign saying you need a high clearance vehicle to continue. You are driving in between the land features at this point which was really cool.

When we got down to the high clearance signs we saw a minivan parked an no one around. We figured someone was out walking around. So we go down the trail and James keeps saying “we’ll see how far we make it” because he had watched some videos that looked like it might be more than the Bronco could drive through. I think it was fine.

Every time there was something that looked too hard to go through there was a little path to go around the area. We made a few stops to look at the area again but this time less traveled.

After adventuring for a little while we saw a man walking the trail. I would say he was in his 60’s just trucking right along down this path on foot. We passed him and then he caught up to us at the end of the trail. We ran into a spot that we couldn’t go across with the Bronco but it turns out we were very close to the end anyway. After walking down to the end I’m glad we stopped when we did because the trail just stops at a drop off and then you’re surrounded by the sights. It was really cool to see. I walked down taking a video and when I got back James was talking to the man on the trail. He was from Ohio and seemed very nice. James wanted to get one of the RC cars out and drive it a little. The man came back up the trail in time to see us and he thought it was cool. I wish I had gotten his name.

James and I walked back to the end of the trail just so he could see it too. Then we got back in the car and, really, started the drive home. It’s weird to think we drove from the Badlands to home but that’s what we did.

Once we got on 90 we found a little place to eat dinner. Nothing fancy, it was really the only place to eat for a long way. I had chicken fingers and fries, James had a roast beef sandwich with gravy and potatoes. At some point we decided just to get home and not stop overnight. We took turns driving as we do and got home around 10pm on Saturday night. We unpacked the car, got a much needed shower, and passed out shortly after. It was nice to have a whole day to unpack the bags and do laundry.

Custer State Park and Iconic Drives

On Thursday, our fourth full day in South Dakota, we decided to first drive through Custer State Park, Then take a couple of the iconic drives around the area.

Since the is was the last full day in South Dakota, we slept in a little later than we had been. We got a few things together, the usual cameras, and we ate the donuts we got at Wall Drug for breakfast before heading out.

The park has a fee to enter, which is good for 7 days, and costs 20 or 30 bucks. The pass is nice to get right off the bat, since as you drive around the area, you could possibly go in and out of the park frequently. We got our sticker, still on the Bronco, and started off on about a half hour drive to the Wildlife Loop. It’s a pretty cool drive up and down a few mountains and through the woods, which are is some places totally destroyed either by fires or bugs. Some areas throughout the Black Hills are pretty sad looking because of this, a lot of mountain tops are just stumps and fallen trees.

We came up on a pretty large herd of buffalo shortly after starting the loop. There were many cars stopped on both sides of the road to see them. We slowly moved passed them, giving Kacie lots of time to snap photos.

As we’ve said before, we were in town at a good time since there were quite a few babies running around here too.

Having seen this herd and the heard we had seen the day before at the Badlands, I have no doubt one of these buffalos was the 1000th we’d seen in the past two days. I feel like that’s a lot of buffalo that not everyone gets to see when they come out here. Having said that, we had seen, and Kacie had taken photos of, enough buffalo now. We drove off, catching another couple stranglers drinking at a creek shortly after the original herd, and heading to find the gravel and dirt, less traveled roads.

Except for the Wildlife Loop, at lot of the roads running throughout the park are gravel. They are well maintained, so you would be fine to drive it in a car, although it’s nice to have a little clearance in some spots. We zig-zagged through the park for the next couple hours, periodically seeing various wildlife.

The prairie dogs are everywhere with flat land, and a lot of the these flat spots are where the roads are. Many times you will look around and find that you are surrounded by prairie dog towns, most times hearing their little barks as you drive by. At one of these spots that we had stopped, all of a sudden an antelope hopped up out of the field and made his way across the road in front of us. He was cool to see, and wasn’t very scared of the Bronco, so he hung out for a minute after he crossed.

We popped back onto the Wildlife Loop at a little visitor station and ran in to check it out. It wasn’t anything special and pretty small, but it did have some info about the park at this time of year that was interesting. Which animals were where and what they were doing, that kind of thing. We hopped back onto the main road and heading out the park.

We exited Custer State Park close to the bottom of one of the iconic drives in the Black Hills. Iron Mountain Road runs north to south from Mount Rushmore to Custer State Park… roughly. It’s big with bikers since it has many interesting features and views. They love to advertise it as:

17 MILES

314 CURVES

14 SWITCHBACKS

3 PIGTAILS

3 TUNNELS

4 PRESIDENTS

2 SPLITS

I think I got a t-shirt that says that… I took maybe an hour to make our way north on Iron Mountain Road. We drove around all the corners and through the tunnels, only really stopping once to get a few shots of Mount Rushmore from one of the high points of the road.

As we came to the end of Iron Mountain Road, which is right down the road from the Mount Rushmore entrance, we found a cool little place to get some lunch in a little tourist trap of a town that I don’t remember the name of. It was at the end of a little strip mall of souvenir shops, and had a little place for a couple tables outside. We sat inside. Kacie got a BLT with curds and I got another buffalo burger with fries. We shared. The buffalo burger was way better than the one I had the day before. You could tell they had just formed it before cooking it for me. It was good. It was all good, and the lady that ran it was very nice. As we left she told us a story about a buffalo ripping a lady’s pants off. Before we left we had to wonder up the strip mall and buy too many t-shirts and stickers at the various little shops.

Eventuall we hopped back in the Bronco and found our way to the north end of Needles Highway, back in Custer State Park. Coming in to the beginning of the next iconic route, we first stopped at Sylvan Lake and took a look around. It’s a picturesque mountain lake, but it’s a tourist trap. There were people all over the place and it was chilly by the lake. So we took a look around and checked out the cool rock outcropping around it before heading back to the car.

Needles Highway is known for cutting through jagged, needle-like vertical rock outcroppings and tunnels. Again, we hit all the spots. There’s only one road and everybody takes it. This one was a lot more crowded than Iron Mountain. As Kacie skillfully drove through the hills, she had to navigate countless people parked on the side of the road, and wondering around almost aimlessly, in whatever direction makes the least sense. In one of the more congested switchbacks, we heard what we at first thought was a child wailing in the back of a car. As we discussed it as we made our way past where the car was parked, we think it might have actually been a teen or adult. It’s not a pleasant sound, you can hear it in the video.

Other than dodging a few people, it is a beautiful drive. You get really close to the rock walls driving through some of these tunnels, although there were quite a few vehicles a lot wider than us going through. A few I’d be worried about if I was driving. The terrain is otherworldly, and you drive right through the really cool looking parts. Toward the end of this one, we did start looking for trails off the main road, but everything was private or no motor vehicles.

It was late afternoon before we turned off of Needles Highway, so we decided to just head back to the house. On the way, we figured we’d hit the mini gold course down the road a bit from where we were staying. It was quite a challenging course, but not difficult in appreance. Difficult because there were no flat spots, on any surface, on any of the holes. If you could get your ball to stop rolling when you put it down to take your first putt, then all bets were off, no matter which direction or strength you hit the ball. We did keep score, but were both far over par. But it was fun to just play for a bit. It was a quick course to get through, even with that many strokes, so we finally headed to the house.

It had been a long week, so we figured on some comfort food tonight. Pizza Hut. And there was one right in town on the main street through town. They even had a drive through window, although when we pulled up the guy seemed confused and scared. I believe he had a tenuous grasp of the English language and didn’t know what to say. So he told us to come back in ten minutes… So we parked down the street and Kacie went in to get it. It was ready as soon as she waked in, although it was under something like “Cassie”. We also had a few apps at home we had bought earlier in the week. It was all delicious and filling. After that we washed up, watched some Wednesday on Netflix and passed out. The next morning we had to pack up and head home.

The Badlands

Wednesday we took the day to explore The Badlands. The plan was to drive through the park, visit Wall, SD, and see as many buffalo as we could. And we saw all the Buffalo.

The only deadline we had was 10am at the Badlands observatory for some star gazing, so we didn’t need to get up early for anything. We started the day around 9:30am and stopped in Custer for some breakfast. We went to Baker’s Bakery Café where they make their own rolls. I had a breakfast sandwich on said roll and James had an omelet. Both were very good. They actually had an iced latte so I had delicious iced coffee with caramel flavor for the first time in days. It was so good. Then it was about a 2 hour drive over to the entrance of the park. We made good time and were in around noon. The first few stops were riddled with people but as we got further into the park people started to spread out a little bit. It is a big place; like 244,000 acres big and you can technically go anywhere you want. Obviously there are roads and a specific scenic drive through but you can park and get out where ever you want to.

We started at the visitor center like good little tourists and started in the scenic loop. There were a lot of scenic overlooks. Some were more crowed than others but all of them had something interesting to look at as far as the land formations. I was just reading about how this formed and you can go here if you want to know. It’s kind of interesting. I think my favorite spot was the Bigfoot Pass Overlook. There was this little boardwalk out to a bench that no one was sitting at so we walked out and just sat there for a little while. It was peaceful. There is also a picnic area at this one with wind shields which seemed nice even though we didn’t eat there. It was super windy at a lot of these spots. I think it was a combination of the weather changing and being on essentially cliffs to see the sights.

We were kind of picking and choosing which stops to take a this point. In our typical fashion we started off stopping everywhere possible which takes a lot of time. Anyway, we came upon the Pinnacle Overlook spot and stopped. It had a large parking lot and bathrooms (which aren’t the best but it’s better than nothing) and a bunch of people were stopped there too. We get out and wonder down the steps to the sight seeing point and I hear James go “Shit!” and I had no idea why. Then he points out long horn sheep! Now you have to understand, I’ve been a “little” bitter since Colorado in 2020 about missing the sheep there so this was a big deal for us to finally find some. There were 2 adults and 2 babies which was adorable. I took about 1,000 pictures of them.

While we were standing there James pointed out this awesome blue bird too. I’ve never seen a bird this blue before. I have a few pictures of it but I think this is the best.

Speaking of the best picture… I think this one of the sheep leaping is pretty awesome

It was about 3 by now and we thought we were pretty cool for seeing the sheep. I mentioned I wanted a drink other than water at this point so we decided since we were about to the end of the paved road through the park we would head to Wall and grab some food and explore the town. As we headed out of the park we found what seemed like a bunch of buffalo all in one place. Everyone was stopped along the side of the road and there was this one couple that got out of their car and decided to walk over to the animals. People are nuts. Anyway, they didn’t get into any trouble but man it was weird to see people just wondering up to these huge animals to get a picture with them. Meanwhile, I’m leaning out the car window with my giant zoom lens taking every picture I can.

Moving right along we get to Wall and Wall Drug in about 10 minutes outside the park. As (overly) advertised, there was free ice water and 5c coffee. We opted for the buffalo burgers, soda, and fries. We wondered through the place for a while and got a few things to take home with us, along with donuts for Thursday morning. We got some ice cream and headed back to the park.

There is an unpaved road after the main overlook drive that James wanted to take and it turned out so cool. We come around the corner and see a few more buffalo in the grassland area so we stopped at the next pull off. We hop out of the car and walk down the road a little way to catch them in their element. James talked me out of going into the field (good idea). We stand there taking some pictures and then one comes up over a hill and James says we better get back to the car. We start walking back and he is following us the whole way. I stopped to take a few pictures but we kept moving until he stopped and just stood there. I took a few more pictures of him until I realized he’s just staring me down and it was a little uncomfortable. So I finally get back into the car and it turns out he just wanted to be in the parking lot where we were standing.

We drive down the road a little further and at this point it’s about 5:30pm. We come around a turn and a bunch of cars are stopped then we see the biggest herd of buffalo I’ve ever seen. I think it was all the buffalo. There was a sign earlier in the park saying there were like 900 buffalo in the park total and there were so many in this specific herd that there couldn’t have been any left for anyone else to see. I couldn’t get back far enough to see the whole thing in one picture. There were little baby buffalo in the crowd too and they were super cute.

The other thing I find kind of nuts is the prairie dogs just hanging out with the buffalo. Like you would think those little rugrats would scatter when the big scary animals come to town but it just isn’t true. They were right there in the mix with their houses and babies and no one seemed to mind the other.

After this we were almost through the gravel road and the weather was turning. The observatory place let us know earlier in the day they were canceling our tickets for the evening because of cloud cover so we didn’t need to stick around. We started heading back home around 6:30 and the sky was crazy. The storms out here seem different but I think it’s just because you can see so far away so we saw it coming for a while. Actually, in the park there were a few people setting up cameras to record the clouds and lighting rolling in and I bet they got some really good footage. We made it home dodging rain drops (we ended up scooting right between 2 bigger storms). I got right into looking at the pictures we had taken through the day. I can’t believe the amount of animal life we saw and how cool it was.

Tomorrow will be a relaxing day of driving through Custer state park. Much closer to home and a more leisurely day.

Black Hills Off Road Adventure

The next day of our trip was a whole day of ripping through the Black Hills in a Polaris RZR, a brand new purpose built monster we put to the test, sometimes unintentionally.

We started the morning bright and early at 7:30, when we arrived at Adventure Rentals in Custer. This rental outfit was very impressive, with almost too many employees, a rare sight in 2024. The three college girls out front sign you in and outfit everyone who rents from them with a kit consisting of a spray bottle and towel to wipe off the windshield, an emergency beacon since there is almost no cell reception out there, and a Samsung tablet with GPS loaded with all Black Hills trails complete with points of interest. After signing in and getting the kit, we were then familiarized with the tablet by another very nice lady. We caught on quick and were off to find our vehicle and be fitted for helmets.

The numerous guys that were there to take care of everything after the registration process had already guessed our sizes, correctly, and set us over to who we assume was the manager of the whole place. He took us over to brand new RZR, only 30 miles on it, which were delivery miles, and showed us the basics. Since we have driven side by sides before, we were easy customers and he told us to break her in… we did.

Since Adventure Rentals is right in the middle of town in Custer, the first couple miles of anyone’s off road journey is on public, paved roads. Side by sides, four wheelers and dirt bikes are legal in South Dakota on any road except interstate highways, as long as the vehicle is registered. So we took off right through the middle of town and up the state highway three and a half miles to where the trail system starts. It was around 8am, so there was traffic. But, these vehicles are more than capable of driving in traffic at 50 mph, so no big deal.

Our first destination was a POI on the tablet, an old abandoned silica mine. The trails to it were fairly easy, since a lot of trails were not just for recreational vehicles, but all highway vehicles, although I wouldn’t' recommend driving something without four wheel drive doing it. There were a few challenges on the way, but we would get into more interesting terrain later. We had already switched once before getting there, so since I started off driving out of town, Kacie pulled up to the mine.

The mine had three or four openings carved into the side of a mountain, all interconnected as you get further in. There was evidence of a few cave-ins, and at least one opening that was probably 12-15 feet high, that had been blocked off by one solid rock wall. I have no idea how they pulled this off. There was a ton of graffiti, no surprise there, mostly only visible with a flashlight. It doesn’t take long once you’ve in the cave until you’re in total darkness.. The caves aren’t that deep, but still, almost no light gets in. We probaly only spent a half hour or so at the mine, and then I jumped back in the driver side.

After the mine, we looked for more difficult trails to experience… and we did. Our next destination was a lake in the middle of nowhere to have lunch. We found quite a few trails that put the RZR to the test. This model was 62” wide, which is the limit for a lot of the hardcore trails, mostly meant for four wheelers and dirt bikes. Some trails really were only that wide, but we navigated them fairly easily. A lot of rocks out here, and since there had been rain for the past couple days, a lot of mud holes too. The mud was fun to hit, but always made the windshield a challenge to see through.

On the way to the lake, we somehow took a wrong turn and made it onto a powerline trail that we probably shouldn’t have tried, but we thought it would get us there. It was mostly loose rocks, and pretty steep. Shortly after starting this trail, I actually needed to put it into four wheel low gear to continue on. We got to the highest point beside a powerline, and then saw that we would have to descend. We did, slowly and carefully, bouncing down over the rocks. After a bit of white knuckled, hard on the brakes fun, we came up to what we found out was the end, a five foot drop with no trail we could find after it. I wasn’t going to drop that thing off of that drop anyway, so the only choice was to go back up where we had just come from. Neither of us were overly confident about climbing what we had just come down, but there wasn’t much choice. Lucky, the current generation RZR is more than capable of climbing. I had to do the whole ascent in low gear again, but we crawled the whole way up with almost no variation in speed. The thing just walked up all the rock faces, twists and turns, without even thinking about it. I was though, if I messed this up, we were activating the beacon. A more experienced driver probably wouldn’t have even worried in a machine like we were driving, but this one was something like you see in Youtube videos and say “damn”.

After getting out of that one, we found another route to the lake which was pretty uneventful.

The lake was beautiful, and stretched pretty far from where we stopped to eat our PB&J’s. It was a nice little park/picnic area with tables and a bathroom. We did see a couple people in a boat, strangely enough towing two kayaks, but no other life in sight. It was nice and peaceful and relaxing. But, by then it was already around 1 and we had to be back by 4. We were pretty far from Custer at this point, so we needed to start moving in that direction directly.

After lunch at the lake, we found a pretty direct route, we thought, back. We mostly stayed on dirt roads south, hitting a few more interesting trails where we could, not getting too off track from our route south to Custer. We did run into a few trails that were closed to motor vehicles, but did manage to get a few in that were fairly challenging. However, for the most part, we did the hard stuff in the first half of the day.

Creek Crossing

Right before getting back on the highway we found a spot where you can see Crazy Horse. It was pretty far away but the phone cameras can really zoom. I wanted to go to the monument (Kacie) but now I feel like we’ve seen it without having to pay the entrance fee.

With about an hour to spare, we hooked back up to the highway to Custer, and pulled into town around 3:30. The RZR was absolutely caked in mud, and so were we. The guys at Adventure Rentals are used to this, I’m sure. They checked us back in, and immediately took the vehicle over to power washer to get it clean for the next day. Kacie went back into the shop to buy a shirt or two while I stayed outside to smoke.

We had planned on staying in town after to eat dinner, but needed to shower first. Luckily, our rental house was about 10 minutes out of town, so we could run, home, shower, and then head back for dinner.

We ended up at what was advertised as the oldest saloon in South Dakota. Maybe it was, we didn’t care much about it’s history after the crazy day we had. I had a burger and Kacie had a salad… go figure. And we both probably had too many drinks. We escaped that place right before they started Bingo. No matter what state we end up in, every bar feels the need to do bingo, or karaoke, or some other sad thing. We got out of there and headed home. It was a good day.

Devils Tower & Deadwood

Day 3 of our trip to South Dakota, we decided to take in the sights at Devils Tower and Deadwood.

While at the hotel in IA, we talked about what to get into on Monday and thought “hey why not Devils Tower?” Which led us to think Devils Tower on Memorial day may not be the best idea assuming more people have off and are traveling. Which then led to the idea to see the sun rise at the monument. Great idea at the time, in practice we had to get up at 2:30am so we would get to the site by sunrise - which was 5:18am. Long story short, we ended up with a nice 4 hour nap before starting our day.

The drive to the tower was uneventful other than thinking a deer was going jump out at any time but we made it without incident. We thought the look out points would be further away from the tower so we ended up driving right into the visitor’s center at the tower itself. The intention was to get some pictures further away with the sun coming up but not everything works out to plan. Anyhow, no one is at the guard station that early but you can just drive right in. The site itself is open all of the time and we just showed our ticket on the way back out. After all this, we still were the third car in the lot.

We began our 1 mile trek around the tower and saw 4 deer I think. Or maybe the same 2 deer 3 separate times, I really can’t be sure. They didn’t seem to care about us and were probably used to people if they live in the area. It was peaceful that early in the morning. We ran into 4 other people, 2 of them were there to climb. I didn’t realize this but anyone can climb to the top of the tower you just have to register at the gate that you are going. I could never make the climb but we did find those 2 guys on the side of the tower about 2 hours later when we were half way around. (Yes, it took us 2 hours to go 1/2 a mile…the pictures were worth it.)

Just some facts I read about the tower before we got there:

It is 867 feet tall, the base is 1 mile around

Climbing to the top takes on average 5 hours but someone did it in 18 minutes. That was the fastest recorded time to climb to the top and the guy didn’t use any ropes.

There have been 6 recorded fatalities since 1937.

They usually get 500,000 visitors per year

There was a massive amount of fog in this valley right outside the park which didn’t seem to go away. Once the sun got up high enough it did but it just seemed odd that it stuck around for so long. It looked really cool. From different angles along the trail it almost looked like water.

Once we got around the the second side of the tower it became super windy. I assume it had been blocking the wind when we were on the first side of the trail loop. It helped to speed us up as we headed back to the car. This is where we found the climbers on the side of the mountain. It was so wild to see them up there looking so tiny.

Ok, we finally came back down and on the way stopped at some of the overlooks. We realized that you can see the tower from these spots and it is a nice view, but when we went in it was too dark to notice. Which is hilarious when you think about our plan from the beginning. We also saw prairie dogs. They are so adorable. Being spring, there were a lot of babies. I found this little guy coming out of his home. There had been a bigger one sitting at the entrance for a long time and once that one got out of the way this little guy popped out.

By the time we got back out of the park it was 9am so we stopped for breakfast at the little café at the bottom of the entrance. I had a breakfast burrito and James had pancakes. After being up for almost 8 hours, we were pretty hungry. Then we went next door and looked for some souvenirs. We got a few things and headed to Deadwood. The drive took a little over an hour and wasn’t bad. We ended up there right around 12:30pm to see the town. You could tell it was a tourist trap and even though they made the street look “old timey” it didn’t feel authentic. There were a bunch of casinos but no one was in them. To be fair, it was mid day on a holiday Monday but still, it seemed a little sad. That did not deter us from wondering the streets and stopping at the souvenir shops. They were all pretty much identical and by the end of our walk James said he just couldn’t go into another shop that looked exactly the same. We were still pretty full from our breakfast so instead of getting dinner like we planned, we stopped at a restaurant and sat outside with some appetizers and then came home. It was about an hour back to our place and we were struggling to stay awake at this point. Which was 4pm lol.

We went to bed early because Tuesday is off roading day and we have to be at the rental place at 7:30am. This time we only have to drive 10 min down the street so we will have much more rest.

Driving to South Dakota

Driving to South Dakota started with 15 hours of driving and an overnight stay in Iowa.

I worked a full day on Friday, as is our custom, and James had the day off. He got some house stuff done (like mowing) and pulled together the last of the things we wanted to be sure to bring along. I had my clothes and camera packed Thursday and ready to go. Longest day of work ever.

We decided to leave on Friday so we could take our time getting to our first stop. We knew it would be about 15 hours and we figured if we left between 10-11pm we would get into town early enough for lunch and then check in. We haven’t broken up a drive like this before and it was actually really nice. I feel like I could enjoy the last leg of the drive much more than if we had just gone straight through but we will get to that later.

Before we left town we made our customary stop at Sheetz for gas and some drinks. I went into the store while James filled the tank. Of course I came back out to the car to find him talking to some stranger about the Bronco. He happened to be driving the same car and I guess they just found each other. He seemed like a nice guy but I was glad to get moving. James drove through the night until about 4am and I slept. I had gotten this pillow like a large neck pillow and I loved it. I slept for a little in this beginning part of the trip and then took over for the morning leg. James didn’t use the pillow but I think he slept a little. We made it to Indiana before I even drove so that was nice.

Indianapolis was no problem because we got there around 5am and breezed right through. I had an uneventful drive and we swapped back in about 4 hours. The intention was to stop at one of those rest stops but once we drove the extra 30 miles to get there and do an easy on and off, it was closed. The next exist was Blue Earth, MN which I guess is the home of the Jolly Green Giant. They have a statue and everything. Who knew.

They had a little pea too which was cute. Here is a little page about the statue if you want to read more

We moved on after a brief break and made it to Iowa without trouble. The drive was nice. We didn’t hit any traffic or any rain which was amazing. There were pretty big storms in Texas but thankfully, that was to the south of us. When we were about an hour outside Waterloo, IA (where we were staying the night) I started looking for places to eat. I found a Shake Shack about 10 min away and we went right there. Neither of us had had that in a long time and it was really good.

We checked in a Comfort Inn and Suites at 3pm to a king suite, showered, changed, and passed out for a few hours. We were back up again around 6am the next day for our breakfast and on the road again. We had just under 10 hours to got to get to South Dakota and wanted to get moving again.

We were going past Sioux Falls and decided to make a stop to see these falls. This was really the only thing that happened from when we left IA until we got to South Dakota. It appears that the town was built up around this waterfall system in the middle of the town which is pretty cool. It is a park and a lot of people go there as tourists but it looked like a lot of locals there too. There were people sitting in the park reading which seems like an activity you do when you can go there whenever you want.

We ate lunch at the cafe that overlooks the falls. I had a pulled pork sandwich and James had his usual burger. They were both really good. There are ruins of an old mill next to the water and a little info board next to it which was mildly interesting. It was a nice little stop to break up the drive.

We did hit some rain then in South Dakota. Honestly, we had so many dead bugs on the windshield it helped to have them washed away by the rain. It was mostly just a rain shower, there was one part that was a little heavy but not very eventful. We were traveling west and the storm was going east so it didn’t take too long to pass through.

As we were getting closer to Custer, SD (which is where we are staying), we started to see about 1,000 signs for Wall Drug. Some are clever and funny but the charm wore off a bit after the first 500 signs. We still plan to go there though so I guess marketing works. We also started to see the Badlands which I am so excited to see up close.

We passed a lot of cows also but no buffalo and no sheep…yet (I hope). It was really nice to be able to enjoy the drive into town. I think staying overnight and getting some rest helped to make the trip feel more like a nice journey rather than a means to an end.

We got into Custer around 7pm and stopped for some groceries. Our place is really nice. We have a lot of room and a washer/dryer which is perfect. Even though I packed enough clothes for 5 weeks, I’ll want to wear the same 4 things the whole time so at least I can wash it.

Tomorrow is Devils Tower and we plan to get up super early so we can beat the rush. It will be Memorial Day tomorrow and we are worried it will be super crowded. We plan to get a few hours of sleep and head out before sunrise. It is about a 2 hour drive from where we are.