June 5: Badlands National Park, South Dakota

We drove all the way from Wisconsin to the Badlands in South Dakota. Enough said.

We left Oconomowoc (Louisa loves saying/writing this word as much as possible) at around 6:30, after some of Diane’s delicious blueberry muffins. Wisconsin lives up to its reputation as a cheese-obsessed state, though we didn’t actually eat any since it was very early in the morning.

After crossing the Mississippi (and briefly trying to understand the difference between the Mississippi and the Missouri), we entered Minnesota. Minnesota had a lot to offer. Such as the SPAM Museum. Which made the two of us, both vegetarians, very desirous of a spamburger or other such creation.

Instead of SPAM, we went to the A&W drive-up restaurant and ordered root beer floats. It was very cool to sit in the car and have them bring out our drinks for us. They were very well made, too – as they should be, considering root beer is their specialty.

In South Dakota, we found that all of the rest stops in the state have giant stone tipis (this is the South Dakota spelling of the more commonly known teepee). Very cool. One even had a Lewis and Clark information center, which was unfortunately closed when we got there. But we got some great views of the Missouri River from the look-out point.

After long, flat (slightly boring) South Dakota, we were ecstatic to see the Badlands rise out of the prairie. We had sprinted the last section of the marathon, since we (erroneously) thought we had to be there at a certain time, so when we arrived at the entrance 6 minutes ahead of time, we had to stop the car and calm down from all of our excitement. Our first national park.

The Badlands were beautiful and rather unexpected in that section of South Dakota. The road through the park goes along what is called the “Wall” – the enormous rock formation that the park was created around. The sun had started to set and the different layers of rock looked amazing in the changing light.

Our campsite was at the other end of the park, off of a long dirt road. On the way there, we saw two buffalo just chilling by the side of the road, and we hurriedly jumped out to take pictures. Little did we know that we would be having many even more intimate encounters with the animals over the course of the next few days.

When we arrived at the campsite, we saw that there were already several other tents set up, so we quickly found a spot and started setting up ours. After we hammered in most of the stakes we realized that we would be sleeping right next to a huge pile of buffalo dung. It was much too cold and windy to move, however. We joked about buffalo coming to visit our campsite while we slept.

The night, our first camping experience, was a bit of a disaster, to say the least. Though we went to bed early, neither of us could sleep because the wind was flapping the tent very loudly. Both of us had a very restless night, waking up to strange sounds. Louisa woke up at little after midnight in a puddle, but since there was some sort of hurricane going on outside, she couldn’t bring herself to move to the car.

When it finally was 6 in the morning, both of us were very happy to get up. We had been waiting all night for the morning, and Louisa was curled up Emily’s feet, trying to find a dry spot. We gathered up our belongings, hoping to only make one trip to the car, but we immediately dropped almost all of it when we unzipped the tent and found two buffalo hanging out in the campsite. Emily decided to be brave and head over to the bathroom but almost had to stay there when one of the buffalo eyed her and started walking towards her. Later we would see a video of a girl getting gored by a bison – something we were glad we didn’t see before we woke up next to several.