Today we headed north to Medora, North Dakota, the gateway to the South Unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. It was about a four-hour drive, and we thought we'd arrive in time to do some hiking in the afternoon. Unfortunately, it began to rain mid-day and didn't stop until nearly sundown. We'll try again tomorrow. The forecast is for partly cloudy, or mostly sunny, or partly sunny. I can never tell what those icons mean. We headed north from Deadwood after breakfast, making our first stop in Belle Fourch SD at the Geographic Center of the Nation and Tri-State Museum. Why is the center here? Because when Hawaii was admitted to the Union in 1959, its landmass – added to the landmass of the continental U.S. – shifted the geographic center of the 50 states to latitude 44 degrees, 58’N, longitude 103 degrees 46’W, which is approximately 20 miles north of Belle Fourche. The actual geographic center is on private land, marked with a small metal survey marker and a flag. Belle Fourche, however, felt that the Center of the Nation deserved a, big beautiful monument. And since the town falls within the measurement’s margin of error, the Chamber of Commerce conducted a fundraising effort to build it on the land below the museum. The museum itself is charming. It has many items of daily living from pioneer days up to the early 1950's. I was amused to see one of the old shoe store x-ray machines, and a hair salon permanent wave machine (looks like a torture device) that I remember from my childhood. It's a miracle we survived. Most of the terrain from Deadwood north is flat prairie suitable for grazing cattle and sheep. There are long stretches where the road runs straight into the distance. Occasionally, stone monoliths loom up in the open range, like the Crow Buttes pictured below. And of course, while traveling down a perfectly normal two-lane highway, we came to a stretch of road under construction that required a pilot car to guide us through the one-lane gravel section. I'll toss in a shot here of an oil derrick. We saw about half a dozen fairly small ones. To break up a long drive, I check out Roadside America to find odd and unusual places to take photos. RA came up with this gem in Bowman ND: A cowboy riding a missile, propped on an old fire truck. Also a weather vane airplane that moves with the wind, mounted on an old wooden bridge that we drove through. It didn't look safe, but someone on RA commented that they did it, and we didn't fall through. We finally made it to Theodore Roosevelt National Park, in the rain. We stopped at the visitor center, watched a short film, and had a look at Teddy's original log cabin (which was moved to this spot from somewhere else). We spoke with a ranger and got suggestions for short hikes in the park, and there is a scenic drive if we give up on hiking. We'll try again tomorrow and hope the weather is better. Well, that was a lot for a day that was basically driving from one place to another. Tomorrow, after the park, we start heading east on the way home. Just a few more stops. It's I-94 all the way to the Wisconsin Dells, so maybe I'll get some knitting done while Bruce drives.
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Another rainy day, off and on. We didn't venture any further than Deadwood's historic main street, only retreating to our hotel when the rain got too heavy. Deadwood's main street is hotels and bars, with a few souvenir shops. Every hotel has a casino, and some of the souvenir shops have bars. And there are a few restaurants that are not bars. But it's mostly casinos and bars. Pretty much everybody who heard we were going on this trip said we had to visit The Brothel in Deadwood. Right up until 1980, illegal sex work was active in Deadwood and largely ignored by local law enforcement. The guided tour of The Brothel explains how the world's oldest profession impacted the community and tells the stories of some of the women who worked in the sex trade. The rooms contain a variety of period furnishings, from the 1800's up to the 1970's. The rain let up a bit in the late afternoon, but we didn't want to chance taking a hike, so we hopped on one of the Deadwood trolleys, which are the only form of public transportation in Deadwood. They stop at all the hotels, and the outlying KOA campground, taking about 45 minutes to make the entire loop. It's $2 a ride, but residents and people who work in Deadwood ride for free. We stayed on for a loop-and-a-half, chatting with the driver and getting to see some parts of Deadwood we hadn't gotten to on foot. Bruce discovered that there was a band playing at the #10 Tavern, starting at 9pm, so we ate supper upstairs at the Deadwood Social Club first and then enjoyed two sets of music from the 60's, 70's, and 80's by the Shuffle band from Utah. They had no set list. All the songs they played were requested by the audience via text message. And if they didn't know a song, they did a pretty good job of playing it anyway.
Tomorrow looks to be a sunny day, if a bit chilly. We hope to get in some nice hikes.
There are two major caves run by the National Park Service: Wind Cave in Hot Springs SD and Jewel Cave in Custer SD. Since cave tours are suspended at Wind Cave due to elevator replacement, we snagged a tour at busy Jewel Cave for 1:00 pm.
That left our morning free in Hill City. We had passed the small "dinosaur museum" on the main street several times without going in, but this seemed like the perfect opportunity to visit. Bruce's friend Steve Simpson highly recommended The Museum at Black Hills Institute, so we had to visit. What a remarkable small museum. The number of actual and reproduction dinosaur skeletons is amazing.
I also learned a lot more about the history of Sue, Chicago's own T-Rex at the Field Museum. See the sign above.
So, on to Jewel Cave. We got there early and did a nice short walk on the Roof Trail, less than a mile. Then it was down into the cave with our group and a ranger escort. Jewel Cave is so extensive that much of it has not yet been mapped. Cave explorers go into the cave with specialized tools for measuring and recording their location. There are several "base camps" with sleeping bags and portable "facilities" so that cave explorers can reach even further into the cave. We asked, and yes, they must pack out all their waste (even "that").
Jewel Cave is made of limestone and has many levels, as shown in the first photo below. For casual visitors like us, there are lots of stairs, some pretty steep. The weather gods had been smiling on us the whole trip so far but decided that it would be okay to rain since we were underground. However, it continued to rain for our 80-mile drive to Deadwood, our next destination. We decided to follow Apple Maps' quickest route, which looked like an interesting ride in the countryside over roads we hadn't already traveled. That was fine for a while until we found ourselves on a gravel road. The rain kept the dust down, but the road got progressively worse and we ran into construction where the road was one-way only. We stopped behind a small truck to wait for a "pilot" to lead us through the construction zone. How bad could it be? There was a section where there was no road at all, only mud, and another section of fist-sized rocks that banged up under the car so much that I was afraid we'd rupture something under there. At the end, we were so happy to come out on a normal gravel road, and ecstatic to come upon an actual paved road. I made a short video of the road, with audio commentary. After breakfast in Wall, we headed west to Rapid City and then to tonight's destination, Allen Gulch Cabins in Hill City, SD. We made my first yarn store stop at SlipKnits in Rapid City where I bought a skein of the shop's own hand dyed yarn. That's the ultimate in local "souvenir yarn." And according to the universal law that there is always a brewpub within a few blocks of a yarn store, Bruce found Log Cabin Brewpub to hang out in while I shopped for yarn. After checking in to our cabin and chatting with Maggie, the owner's mother and bartender at the resort's taproom, we walked along the town's main street and did a little shopping. Supper was at the much-recommended Alpine Inn, where there are only two choices: a vegetarian option of German dumplings and a bacon-wrapped filet with lettuce wedge and baked potato. Guess which one we got. The restaurant is in an old hotel, and the ambience is warm and cozy. After supper, we drove to Mount Rushmore to see it lit up at night. Unfortunately, the evening ceremony that everyone told us not to miss was not available this early in May. We got up early this morning and headed for Badlands National Park to get in some hiking before the forecast rain. We haven't gotten a lot of use out of our $10 Lifetime Senior Pass for national parks that we got eight years ago on our Route 66 roadtrip. But admission to Badlands was $30 per car, so even at the current $80 cost for the lifetime pass, that would be worth it for visiting only a few national parks. The weather held out until around noon, so we got in a few short easy hikes and one longer, more challenging hike where we had to climb a trail that was steep and often covered in loose gravel-like rock. We didn't make it to the top of that one. I had to call it quits at about the three-quarter mark, and a good thing, too, because I wouldn't have wanted to try that descent in the rain. The scenery here is amazing. I've read that it's like seeing the surface of the moon, very alien. We headed back into town for a late lunch at Wall Drug. If you've ever traveled anywhere with 200 miles of Wall, SD, you've seen the signs for Wall Drug. It started out as a small drug store but is now a mega-complex of shops and other attractions, and a 500+ seat restaurant that serves 5-cent coffee and $10 pie. They even have a tiny chapel. Tomorrow we head for the Black Hills. We'll be in that area for about five days. Lots to see: Mount Rushmore, the Crazy Horse monument, Custer State Park, etc.
After a comfortable night at our Airbnb in Fairmont MN, we hit the road after breakfast for our first of what I thought would be three hikes in Garretson SD. It turned out that the first hike was so lovely, and so strenuous, that we (well, I mainly) decided to press on to Sioux Falls and take a lovely shower in our hotel there before finding our supper. We hiked the Split Rock Creek Trail in Palisades State Park. My AllTrails app says this hike should be 1.5 miles and take an average of 33 minutes. After much clambering up and down over rocks, we clocked in at 1.76 miles and 1h32m. I'm sure we were off trail for some of it. It's a beautiful park, as you will see below. (If you are viewing the slideshow on a phone and all the photos are in one vertical line, I know about this problem and have requested help.) After resting in our room and a nice supper, we decided to take another, less strenuous walk in the Sioux Falls Japanese Gardens. This is a long strip of green space along a lake with some nice Japanese touches but not like other Japanese gardens we've visited. But it was a pleasant short walk. I'd read about the Arc of Dreams, a giant sculptural arch in downtown Sioux Falls, and saw photos of it lit up at night. It's only a stone's throw from our hotel, so we walked over there to check it out. We didn't get any photos of it lit up, but the ones below are pretty spectacular. We were walking on the bike path along the Big Sioux River and I thought, well, it's not quite dark yet and we're not too far from the actual falls, so we kept on walking and got there just as the sun was going down. It's amazing to see something like this in the heart of a good-sized city (Sioux Falls population is around 200,000). We're going back tomorrow morning to get more photos in the daylight.
We started our road trip yesterday with a short drive to Madison WI for an evening concert by Alan Doyle and his band at The Bur Oak. It was, as usual, a joyous occasion, with Alan interacting with the audience in this intimate setting, and calling up a young boy from the audience to sing a duet with him for the final song. We left Madison this morning and headed west. Our first stop was the FAST Fiberglass Mold Graveyard in Sparta WI. We spent a good hour roaming through a vast field of fiberglass molds used to make "statues, roadside attractions, themed water slides, and larger than life creations of all kinds." It's not actually a graveyard, because any of the molds stored here could be re-used if a customer wanted that piece. We had a nice chat with the owner's dad, who showed us how the molds are made, then how the actual fiberglass creations are produced, and even how the models for the molds are carved. They are actually made of styrofoam, He said that the models used to be carved by hand, but now they are carved by a machine after the design is created on a computer. Next we headed to Grandad Bluff Park in Lacrosse WI, where we had a picnic lunch and then hiked the shaded trails. There weren't too many other hikers, and only one (very polite) mountain biker. Then it was off to the Spam Museum in Austin MN. I can't eat Spam (the sugar in all varieties) but the museum was interesting, bright and colorful. There was even an electric car charging station. Our final stop for the day was a giant Jolly Green Giant statue in Blue Earth MN. There's also a Green Giant museum here, but it had closed by the time we arrived. I don't think that FAST Fiberglass made this one, or they would certainly have mentioned it. We made it to our cozy AirBnB in Fairmont MN and had a nice steak dinner in town. Tomorrow we're off for more hiking on the way to Sioux Falls SD, where we expect to spend a few days.
Bruce and I are off on a road trip in May. We're starting in Madison, WI, with a concert by Alan Doyle, one of our favorite entertainers. We loved his former band, Great Big Sea, from Canada. We now follow him and attend his concerts with his own band whenever possible. Last fall, we took a riverboat trip in France that he headlined. (See previous blog post.)
For our road trip, we're heading to the Black Hills and Mount Rushmore. We're leaving the total number of days open ended, but expect to return by the end of May. We have the first two nights lodging booked, but will wing it after that, as we did on our Route 66 trip in 2016. Here's our proposed route in Roadtrippers. Enter your email in the box on the right to subscribe to our blog and follow along. |
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