They're Badlands All Right

Just sit right back & you’ll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip
That started in this cargo van from a little desert strip.
The mate was a tidy mother-in-law, The driver brave & sure.
Eight passengers set out that day for a three hour tour,
A three hour tour.

Well, anyhow, that's what it felt like at the time. I was sure that disaster was looming when I learned that there would be eight people and one vehicle. My in-laws are good people, but they're the kind of tourists who go somewhere, check it off their list, then move on to the next thing. And they'd already been to everywhere we were planning on going a couple of years ago.


Husband, Daughter and I landed in Rapid City, SD on Thursday around noon. The entire Colorado contingent was there to greet us. I think they had been waiting a good long time because we later heard about how my nephew, who's 3, kept going on the escalators over and over and over again. They were taking shifts with him. Anyhow, we all got in the van and took off for Wall.

They have a very famous drug store that pretty much covers an entire city block. We stopped there for lunch. As we ate our buffalo burgers we we able to look at the maps they had on the table and decide which parts of the store we wnated to check out after lunch. My first stop was the little area behind daughter's head in the photo. I picked up a couple of little trinkets, then went to move on to the next room. At this point I noticed that Father-In-Law was hanging out in front of the store. He was done and waiting for us so that we could leave. I think we explored about 1/20 of the store. Daughter was peeved of course because there were about 15 things she wanted to see, and we had no time. (Did I mention that there was only one vehicle for 8 people?)

So we climbed back in the van and headed to the Badlands. It's actually pretty cool. You're wandering around in the desert and, POOF, you're in these little canyons and mini-mountains. The view from the van windows was very nice as we drove through. At the posted speed limit. And didn't stop to check out any of the trails or scenic overlooks. Actually that's not true. We did stop once and took a couple of pictures.

But we did really go through the entire Badlands in about 1 hour. It may actually have been a good thing that we didn't get out and walk around much. At this particular area -> Daughter took off on a "trail" that wasn't really a trail. She didn't seem to notice that her little trail was headed for a cliff and that there were rattlesnake signs everywhere. Happily there were neither any falls, nor any envenomations, but it was not the only time during this trip that I threatened to leash her to my wrist with a 6 foot length of merino sock yarn.

We then headed to the hotel in Keystone to finish out the day. In order for you to have the right perspective you'll need to keep in mind as we go along that this is a seasonal tourist area, and the season was over about 3 weeks ago. A lot of the shops were closed, a lot of restaurants were closed, and the ones that were open all shut down at about 8:00. And as the weekend went on we discovered that the restaurants that were open were out of a lot of stuff, or just didn't have very good food.

Tomorrow we continue our Wild West travelogue and also answer the question, "Who is that guy, and why should we care?" For now, I have a house to clean.