South Dakota

Tuesday August 21: Yesterday we drove from Sioux Falls to the Black Hills of South Dakota. Along the way we stopped at the Corn Palace in Mitchell, SD which was an extremely cheesy tourist trap and had the slogan "the world's only corn palace," which makes you wonder why they thought the world really needed a corn palace to begin with...But, it was fun stop and see it and laugh at the people who were taking it seriously. We also bought some cool hats there. After that we continued on through South Dakota, where the speed limit finally went up to 75 mph which was nice. The drive was pretty boring and flat as you would expect going through the plains, but once we got to the western end of the state the landscape really changed a lot. All along I-90 in South Dakota there is a place called Wall Drug that has billboards every few miles advertising different things that it has there (such as food, western wear, souvenirs, etc.). They have so many of these billboards that it really makes you start to wonder what kind of place this is, so of course we stopped there as well. It is in Wall, SD which is right near the Badlands, and it is also extremely touristy but fun. It looks like an old west type of town and there were cowboy boots and belt buckles for sale everywhere. So, we ate lunch there and walked around a while and then got back on the road to go to the Black Hills. We decided to camp at a site in the Black HIlls National Forest, which meant that it was really far from anything and a little bit tricky to find. To get there we drove on a windy back road and saw tons of deer which was really cool, as well as free roaming cows that liked to stand in the middle of the road. The highlight of the drive was seeing a huge bull elk cross the road a bit ahead of us and run of the side of the hill. Neither Jeff or I had ever seen an elk so it was really an amazing sight. Once we got to the campground we found that it was absolutely gorgeous. The Black Hills are so beautiful, which the pine forests on top of the reddish rock, and our campsite was really in the middle of the forest. There was also a creek that ran along it and Jeff saw a rainbow trout in there but didn't have time to do a whole lot of fishing. After we left that campsite we drove into Deadwood, an old gold rush town that is now geared a lot towards tourists and even has a gun fight re-enactment ever so often during the day (which we did see). We decided to stay in the Black Hills again tonight, but this time at a different campground. So tonight we are staying at the Fish n' Fry, where you can catch some trout in their pond and then they cook it up for you, and it is just outside of Deadwood. We set up our tent and stuff and then went into Deadwood to explore and take pictures, and it turns out that a lot of the businesses there are casinos, which was interesting to see on the main street of a town. Some of the buildings were cute and old-looking but other than that it was just casinos and shops selling Black Hills Gold. So now we are back at our campground relaxing, and might go try to fly fish at a lake that we saw just down the road from us. Tomorrow we will be going to Yellowstone area, and will just have to wait and see what is available to determine where we go (we are expecting it to be pretty busy at this time of the year...) I'm not sure if we will be able to get internet near Yellowstone, so if not we probably won't be able to check back in until Friday because we plan to stay there for two nights. We will definitely write more when we can!