Our Hundred Day Trek through the US of A, Part 3

July 03, 2013

Part 3

a typical Badlands view

So there we were staying in a hotel for 4 nights in south west South Dakota in the Black Hills to see our first national parks: Badlands and Wind Caves.

for this shot you need to leave the paid parking lot
and continue driving away, Washington for free

this is the paid shot

But as we schlepped our stuff to the room, we had already considered cutting it short, since we just visited the Badlands

miles and miles of uninhabitable space

and Mt Rushmore on the way in and calculated that doing a cave would only take an hour or two more at most.

So I march down to the reception and cancel Monday and Tuesday, giving us the problem of having to book tonight the Glacier National Park lodging, our next park near the Canadian border in Montana.

grazing grounds right outside the badlands

We can unequivocally state, that we are in awe of the bedazzling beauty of this country, its nature, the vastness, the large farms and ranches, and are constantly telling each other, how we would never survive the loneliness, that these farmers and ranchers experience, when your nearest neighbor is 3 or more miles away. We had the pleasure of speaking with a couple of farmers, who on the other hand were wondering, how we could survive living in those "big cities" where we hail from. They had the "pleasure" of visiting Hampton Roads and were really happy to get back home.

South Dakota has 800,000 plus residents and we stayed in the second largest city, Rapid City with 80,000 citizens. This city and Sioux Falls account for a quarter of all South Dakotans. Well here in South Dakota less than 11 people live on a square mile. If you deduct the 25 percent in those two cities as an anomaly for this state, than the rest of the state has inhabitants of less than 7 people per square mile. And think about this: farm families often have more than 5 children per family. The farm couple we spoke with came from a 13 and 9 children family respectively. This couple only had 5 or 6 between them. It is definitely interesting to talk to the locals.

By the way, do not visit Deadwood to see an original Wild West city: after passing hotels, motels, casinos or combinations thereof, you find one block "so called" original street, where families with noisy children congregate every hour on the sidewalks, to see a gun fight on the street, where one cowboy will be shot, while a loudspeaker does a play by play. Does the dead cowboy rise afterwards, while the kids are still there?

The Wind Caves National Park get a 6 on a one to ten scale: a series of long narrow limestone carved out pass-ways, requiring a lot of ducking to spare bumps on your forehead, with no color and no bats, no stalagmite or stalactites, and only two so-so formations pointed out. It seems that underground rivers formed a sponge like cave system, that has only been partially explored spreading out for miles around.

But the surprise was a state park named after General Custer, where we found our first Bison

I walked up to him about 35 feet away,
but then he started
noticing me, so back away

granite spirals in Custer State Park

with young in such quantities, that we became blasé enough later to scowl at people, who stopped during rides in other parks in the middle of the road in front of us, to stare at another group of these wrongly named "buffalos". Buffalo are only found in Asia, which results in the joke: "what does the father buffalo say to his son, when he leaves for his first day to school? Ten seconds for the punch line ......... Bi son bison", a phrase that turns out to be the official Latin name for bison: "Bison Bison".
Since it was a Sunday, the road in Custer park was dotted with cars, but the views made up for it, just view the rock formations and those little creatures on the side of the road. Do you guys know what these are called?

what are they?

Right answer sent in, gets a congratulatory mention in one of the next blogs. We got our first "problem" with the GPS, which did not contain the Wind Caves National Park in its database and since there was no address, we had to consult the map to

in his front hole

find the area where the caves were supposed to be and drove on a dirt road in the general direction for miles and miles through green pastures, over and around hills, finding bison who may never have seen humans.
Beautiful was the drive but also very lonesome, with no cell service and no roads on our gps map, only east, west, north and south indications on a green screen. These are the moments when one marvels about the vastness of this country.

we are driving on the same meadow where
they are grazing

Checking out on Monday morning, our bill reflected 5 different taxes increasing our bill by 22%: a room tax, city tax, a tourist tax, a bed tax (?) and a state sales tax. How to fleece a stranger passing through, never to be heard from again.

Oh, did I tell what we rate our the first national park: the badlands? Well a drive through is definitely sufficient, unless you want to scramble up and down all over them. On the other hand: there were some mountain goats with babies, cute!