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.

Minnesota

 

Minnesota

There was a tension between hurrying to get to our paid-for RV spot in Arizona and just taking our time, enjoying the trip. The forces of anxiety must have been strong in Minnesota because we hurried through there, only spending 2 nights at Myre-Big State Park, just outside of Albert Lea, Minnesota. (As a general rule, we almost never spend only one night anywhere. "Rushing," to us, means not spending 3 or more nights in a particular spot. But to spend only one night--well, that's just not civilized.)

 

The park was very nice. The mosquitos were fairly well-behaved, too, as long as you kept out of their little territories. Some people seemed not at all bothered, lounging around in little but swim suits, but they were enough that we lit mosquito coils before enjoying an evening fire and then still glanced around suspiciously from time to time.

During one evening fire, a raccoon appeared and came straight for us. We thought it was rabid and I grabbed a stick to keep it at bay, if necessary.  It was not necessary. I think it had been fed by humans. He never got too close once he saw that we weren't a raccoon-feeding species.  

We visited the town of Albert Lea while we were there and it was a surprisingly charming little town. It seemed to be built around 2 or 3 really nice lakes all of which had perfectly-maintained parks around them. And they have a mermaid! Every town should have a mermaid!

 

Glendo,Wyoming and Cañon City Colorado

Glendo,Wyoming and Cañon City, Colorado - June 2020

Glendo State Park in Wyoming surrounds a large reservoir on the North Platte River, and has over 500 campsites in various campgrounds on its 22,000 acres. We stayed in the Sandy Beach campground, in the last site available with electricity ... a must for running the AC in hot (mid 90's) weather. This part of the park is accessed by a 12-mile drive around the reservoir on a fairly windy 2-lane road, so once we got there for the 2 nights we were staying, we stayed put. Plus, Glendo is pretty remote and certainly not a restaurant/shopping hub. 

The big attraction was the beach. Dorian tried the water and found it refreshing - a bit on the cold side. Pippi was not interested in the water, but loved frolicking in the sand.

  

We crossed into Colorado on June 17. I had forgotten how much I love beautiful Colorado - well, once we got through the Denver traffic (horrendous, even at non-rush hour). We stayed 4 nights in Cañon City - 2 at a nice KOA, and 2 at even nicer at Cañon City's no-frills (no electricity/water/etc.) first-come first-serve campground 1,000 feet above the town, nearby the Royal Gorge Park. Per my (Ramona's) preference, we eschewed the very nice but tourist-packed Royal Gorge Park with its suspension bridge that spans the far-below Arkansas River, and instead took an awesome hike from our campground along the Canyon Rim Trail.  In the below pictures notice the suspension bridge and far below train tracks running beside the river. We'd love to return to take this train ride, cross the bridge, ride the gondola, etc. -  in a less crowded time.

Another fun activity for the bold driver (Dorian) is Skyline Drive, a one-way path high above Cañon City which offers great views if you can take your eyes from the often hog-backed road with *minimal* clearance on either side. Or so it seemed to me. In the poor quality photo I took from the passenger seat, note the road continuing up and down along the crest of the mountain.... ugh. 

From the only parking spot on Skyline Drive, we walked back to interpretive signs explaining fossils of Ankylosaurid dinosaur footprints. Dorian holds his hand up for a size comparison. Cool!

Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore

Pictured Rocks NL is near Munising, Michigan. As the owner of our only waterproof camera, I got the job of taking pictures. Plus, as the one in the back of the two-person kayak, I was able to get the action shots, such as they are. 

Everyone recommends sea kayaks for Lake Superior. Having heard stories (and seen at least one example) of the fickle weather on Superior, we decided to take a guided tour. We went with https://paddlepicturedrocks.com/ because they take you to the most picturesque areas for kayaking via a passenger boat. We didn't think we had enough kayaking muscles to do the 5+ hour tour that other companies offered in order to see, essentially, the same shoreline. Purists might prefer launching from the shore but we were very happy with our choice.

 

Of the 129 pictures that I took, I chose 18 that were blog-worthy. Of those, I present only these. The editing process is a harsh business.

We watched a cormorant feeding her chicks. What we saw was mostly just silhouette from a hundred feet below and another hundred or so horizontally but it makes a nice picture. Maybe just knowing they are cormorants makes it nicer.

An action shot! You can tell it is an action shot by the exclamation mark I used.

The below cave was short but very cool:

Into the cave

Out of the cave

And, because this tree on Chapel Rock is on the back of the Michigan US quarter dollar coin, a picture is in order. The angle is different on the coin, but I preferred this because it shows the roots which had grown while there was land between Chapel Rock and the shoreline. The roots remained doing their rooty work long after the sandstone around them had collapsed.

As I write this, we are now in Wisconsin. We'll be here for a few more days before heading straight across South Dakota.

First Stops - May 2021

 

ERIE PA - We stayed at the lovely, quiet Lampe Campground on a Lake Erie bay. Across the water is Presque Island State Park, where we biked and picnicked on one of the island's secluded sandy beaches.

MONROE MI - Camped at William Sterling State Park - our second visit here. On our last trip we visited the nearby Henry Ford Museum, which is definitely worth a visit when in this area. This stay, Lake Erie was angry, with heavy winds pushing the lake ashore and roiling the waters. Hardy Michiganders were gathered around campfires despite this, but we cozied up in the trailer and just watched TV. Ramona spent a lot of time trying to find space for the contents of endless bags of (seemingly at the time necessary) stuff from our former Reston home.  

ST IGNACE, MI - We were lucky to get the last spot available at Lakeshore campground for the Memorial Day weekend. We're on Lake Michigan here, having crossed the Mackinac Bridge. Our first stop was Suzy's for local delicacies - pasties (we chose veggie) and smoked whitefish dip.