travelblog: 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.