South Dakota

 We stayed at two places in South Dakota. We really wanted to stay in Badlands National Park

which we know from past experience is a beautiful spot and you can hear the coyotes yipping in the eroded hills around the park as the sun sets...but unfortunately everyone had the same idea and we couldn't score a campsite. Instead, we picnicked there and moved on to

Lake Mitchell, South Dakota

Lake Mitchell, which is in Mitchell, SD, turned out to be really nice. It would have been nice--but not really nice--if we hadn't gotten lucky. The place was completely full except that they had one cancellation just an hour before I made my  reservation. The single campsite turned out to be the best site in the entire park with gorgeous views of the lake. We stayed 3 nights (feeling a bit more relaxed about our westward progress , apparently).

Mitchell, SD is famous for its Corn Palace. Look, they say it is famous and who am I to doubt them?

From some signage inside the palace: It is redecorated with new corn-based designs each year. Each piece of corn is cut in half lengthwise and nailed in place. They use 12 different varieties of corn (with pretty significant color differences) in these design productions, which cost about $130,000 each year.

And then we hurried on to

Custer, SD (the heart of the Black Hills)

Big Pines Campground, Custer, SD

We stayed at Big Pines Campground. We tend to prefer state parks over private campgrounds. Between the summertime popularity of campgrounds and our last-minute approach to our travels, we rarely got the best spots. So I was pleasantly surprised when Big Pines turned out to have the look and feel of a state park and our spot--as usual, one of the last available--turned out to be perfectly nice.

 

We kind of, sort of knew that there was way more to do in the Black Hills area than just Mount Rushmore but we were still surprised by how many amazing places there were. We managed to see  the eponymous cave in Wind Cave National Park. Again, that required a bit of luck since you can't tour the cave by yourself and reservations for guided tours are required. In this case, they had announced a closure of the cave due to some "technical difficulty." They had fixed it by the time we got there but the announcement had kept a lot of people away.

 

 

This cave is famous for having the most boxwork formation in the world. This is boxwork:

Yay, boxwork!

 

And we also did the aptly named Needles Highway drive, including one scary-narrow tunnel.

Some guy in a U-Haul truck went through just before me, stealing my thunder

A view from just above the Needles Highway 

Lots of bison, bountiful bonus bison

And, of course, the requisite coyote...

And next stop, Wyoming!

Madison, Wisconsin

 OK, let me just get this off my chest. I am duly impressed by Frank Lloyd Wright's life and work but I laugh almost every I see one of his houses. And the Madison area has several, so I laughed a lot in Madison.

Frank L. Wright's Unitarian Meeting House

I laugh because he was a typical genius with a major blind spot. He refused to acknowledge how short he was and all his designs have low, traumatic-head-injury-inducing ceilings and no one apparently ever had the courage to point out the obvious problem. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Babcock County Park

We stayed at  the very nice Babcock County Park, named after Stephen Babcock, Wisconsin dairy scientist, known internationally for discovering the method for determining the percentage of butterfat found in milk. If that sounded like I cut and pasted the preceding sentence from the county park's web site, there's a good reason...  I'm sure Mr. Babcock would be proud.

Ramona had some very nice friends in Madison so we stayed 3 nights to make sure we had a chance to see them and also to see some of the Frank Lloyd Wright houses. And, despite my amusement at Mr. Wright's stubborn streak, we were both duly impressed by much of his work. It might not seem groundbreaking now, but it must have been pretty far ahead of his time back when he was convincing people to build his (then-) unusual designs.

 

 

I know nothing about this building but I was very impressed by it. Apparently, it is the US Bank Plaza at 1 South Pinckney St., Madison, WI. It seemed to contain multiple shops, somewhat like a mall. It was in such perfect condition that it looked more like one of those hyper-realistic architectural drawings that look almost real until you see the fake trees and fake people. It also looked incredibly hard to cool in the summer.