On the road again...
Sep. 26th, 2006 08:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
carbonelLast Friday, I started a road trip with Pat Wrede WINOLJ to South Dakota and environs. Our main goals were Mount Rushmore and the Badlands, plus other points to be negotiated as the time arrived. I meant to keep a journal of the trip all along, but tonight's the first time I've actually sat down to do so.
Friday, 22 September
It rained all day Thursday, so I'd hoped it would be nice on Friday, but no luck. We headed out in the rain at 6 pm, or shortly thereafter. It was supposed to be 6, but Pat couldn't find her car keys. They eventually turned out to be on her desk, where she'd checked several times before, but they had slipped under a piece of hardware, and were black on black. Or maybe the cats borrowed them and just got around to replacing them.
Driving was really pretty unpleasant, so we stopped a bit earlier than we'd planned, in Mankato. We stayed at a Days Inn, and I didn't bother to bring in the computer.
Saturday, 23 September
Spent most of the day working our way west on highway 90. It rained most of the day. The landscape went from flat to gently rolling. The most notable scenic item was the zillions of billboards for the Mitchell Corn Palace ("Corn-sider going there") and Wall Drug. Around 3 pm (best guess), we reached the turnoff for the Badlands State Park. There's a scenic loop that parallels 90 (sort of) and takes you through a lot of the best parts of the Badlands. Since it had stopped raining (though it was cold and very windy), we paid our $15 admission and drove through.
It was well worth it. The scenery was breathtaking -- all sorts of peaks and spires, then haystack-shaped mounds, then more peaks and spires. The peaks were often layered in rust and ocher and white. The plain brown ones looked like nothing so much as giant sand castles. We stopped at a couple of the scenic lookouts, and did one short scenic walk, and decided to come back the next day to do it properly. We also stopped at the interpretive center, where Pat bought a bunch of books. This trip is all research for her current book, after all. At one point we stopped to look at a prairie dog colony. Prairie dogs are awfully cute out on the prairie, though I expect they'd be annoying vermin if they were digging up my front yard. Then we found a hotel in Wall (a Best Western), and arranged to stay there for two nights. It turns out Wall is named that because of the 60-mile wall that edges the Badlands, though it keeps eroding away. (I'd never realized that Wall Drug was named after a town, let alone that the town was named after anything other than a Mr. Wall.)
We wandered around Wall Drug (it takes up an entire block and reportedly employs a third of the workers in Wall), then had dinner at the Cactus Cafe. I tried to get online without any luck -- they claimed to have free wireless, but I couldn't get a signal -- so I read for a couple of hours and went to bed.
Pat and I are mostly compatible, except for bedtimes. She thinks that 10 pm is the middle of the night and 8 pm is about time to go to bed, whereas I only recently started going to bed as early as 10:30, mostly as a result of getting up at 6:30 am to exercise. So she goes to bed at 8 or so, and I read or do computer stuff. I've been getting up around 8, and though she gets up earlier, she can read or play computer games until I wake up. So it's mostly been working out. (I asked Pat if it was okay to post this on the Web, and she rather indignantly said that she normally goes to bed at 9 pm, but it's been 8 pm because of the time change.)
Sunday, 24 September
Pat wanted to go to Sunday services, and there was a Catholic church within walking distance, so she went to the 8 am service and I went to a nearby restaurant and had breakfast. They had a breakfast buffet that had rubber eggs and flexible sausage, but the fruit was lovely, so I had two platesful of strawberries, melon, and pineapple. Then we headed back to the Badlands National Park.
The pass we'd paid for the day before was good for a week. This time we stopped at all the scenic views, and did most of the marked walks. The one through the Saddle Pass turned out to be more of a challenge than we'd expected. The description said "Strenuous." What it didn't say was "steep up-and-down grade through narrow passes in rock walls with glutinous mud underfoot." (Well, it had rained the two days before.) It also didn't say "path poorly marked, especially in some of the most interesting (i.e., scary) passages." Once I set myself on the path, though, I was determined to keep going to the end. Also, as long as I kept going, I didn't have to think about the fact that I was going to have to make my way down those steep passages I'd managed to scramble up. Pat, who has a trick knee, rather sensibly decided to head back after about two-thirds of the distance. I pressed on until I got to the point where I thought the path was about to meet up with another trail -- one we didn't intend to take.
I was rather pleased that I managed to make my way down all the steep slopes without ever falling into the mud. My shoes and the bottom of my pants were rather splashed, but so it goes. The surprising thing was that the sides of the passes seemed to be dirt rather than rock. I suppose that helps explain the sand castle-type appearance of much of the Badlands. It's the brown ones that seem to be more dirtlike, with the rust and ocher ones being rock, albeit soft rock.
We had lunch in a restaurant in the park and planned out our afternoon. There was a ten-mile circle walk through a portion of the park, but Pat didn't think she was up for that -- the description said it would take five hours, and while I thought we could probably go faster than that, it did sound a bit extreme. But with the help of one of the guides, we found a place where we could park the car that would take us through a circle route that was only five miles long, so we did that.
Because the soil was mostly clay, and still wet in places from the previous days' rain, we ended up with very muddy shoes, and more mud on our pants, but neither of us fell down. Hey, I take my minor triumphs where I can. The route was mostly flat, but it got us up close and personal with a lot of the peaks (well, their bases), and we confirmed that an awful lot of the Badlands did, in fact, appear to be made of dirt. ("I went to the Badlands and all I saw was dirt," Pat said.)
After some more looking at scenic views, we headed back to the hotel. We had dinner at the same restaurant that I'd had breakfast at. Nothing impressive, but it was food. This time I went to the hotel's lounge to see if I could get a wireless signal. I could, but the woman from the hotel desk was watching Cold Case, and I couldn't manage to tune it out. So I went back to the room, and discovered that I did have a signal still, and took a quick look at e-mail, and got caught up on reading LJ.
Monday, 25 September
We started out fairly early, heading for Mount Rushmore. We stopped at the Gutzon Borglum museum that we'd been seeing signs (both on billboards and on things that looked like the trailer part of trucks) for the last couple of hundred miles. It was worth stopping at, actually. There were many examples of Borglum's sculpture and paintings (as a painter, he was a fine sculptor, IMO). After I saw a few of his sculptures, I said to myself that I bet Rodin was an influence on him, and shortly thereafter, it said that he'd studied under Rodin. I don't know a great deal about art, but the similarity was striking. The museum also covered tidbits that were left out elsewhere, like the fact that Borglum's father was married to Ida, and then when Ida's sister Christina moved out to Utah to join them, she married Borglum's father as well, in the Mormon fashion. Christina was Gutzon Borglum's mother, but when the father left the Mormon church and moved out to Chicago, Christina left because she knew he couldn't be married to two women. Nothing more was said about what happened to her, but Gutzon Borglum left home at age seventeen, having run away (and returned or been returned, that's not clear) several times before. I do wonder what was going on that wasn't told.
After that, we headed for the actual monument. It's...big. Each of the presidents' heads is 60 or so feet high. No matter how cynical I feel about some things, this was really impressive. It's amusing to think that the whole thing started as something that would increase tourist traffic to South Dakota. It worked, too -- Mount Rushmore gets over three million visitors a year. The visitor center there is fairly new, dating from the 1990s, and it's beautiful. There's a walk all around the area, and there was a guided walk with one of the park rangers that we took. We then went down 240 steps to the sculptor's studio, where we saw the one extant working model of the sculpture and a model of the Hall of Records, and then up 120 more steps back to the beginning.
By now it was around 4 pm, and we were tired, so we decided it was time to find a hotel room. We ended up at the Holiday Inn Express because it was in the middle of town (Keystone) and because Pat has a soft spot for Holiday Inn Expresses. They had free wireless, so I fired up LJ and started reading from most recent to oldest, since I had gotten caught up to present time the day before. Which is how I managed to find out about Mike from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
laurel's LJ, where she'd made an entirely (to me, then) oblique comment that I hoped I'd misinterpreted. But the next comment down was from sraun's, which had a link to the Making Light announcement. I spent the rest of the evening, other than a short break for dinner at Subway, reading tributes and crying. Pat very kindly asked if I'd like to go back to town right away for the funeral, but I said I didn't know right now. And then, reading on, I saw that the memorial service wasn't going to be until October, so the question was moot.
Tuesday, September 26
Today, as I write this. The hotel claimed to provide "Continental breakfast plus," which in this case meant hard-boiled eggs and yogurt. The yogurt was the sweetened kind that I'd rather not have, but it was also the stir-fruit-from-the-bottom kind, so I just ate the top part without stirring up the fruit. (I'm still low-carbing even though I'm maintaining my weight, so I'm trying to avoid carbohydrates, especially starches and sugars. Fruits I'm generally okay with.)
After breakfast, we headed north to go to Devils Tower (the apostrophe got lost at some point, so now the apostrophe-less version is official). Not only was this another impressive scenic sight, it was also another state -- I don't think I've ever been to Wyoming before. It's about 110 miles from Keystone to Devils Tower, but it took us somewhat over two hours to get there. This was mostly my fault, since I'd chosen a route that was supposed to be scenic (and was, in fact), but was two lanes most of the way, and not terribly fast. We got there without incident, so my navigating worked.
I'd never heard of Devils Tower until I saw Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Pat has never seen the movie, so she was amused when I told her about the bit where Roy Neary knows about the path that the other woman doesn't, because he was doing sculpture and she was only drawing. The tower is about 840 feet from the ground level, but it's just under a mile above sea level. I knew the ground had been rising as we drove, but I hadn't realized it had been that much. The tower itself looks like nothing so much as a giant blob of clay that someone made into a, um, what's the term for a thing that's like a cylinder except that it's got a larger circumference at the bottom than at the top? Whatever that's called, it looked like a one of those that someone had run giant fingers vertically down all the sides. In fact, it looks like this.
First we listened to a ranger's talk about the history of the tower -- Indian legends, and the first climbers, and current climbing methods. Then we walked the path around the base of the tower, about a mile-and-a-quarter in length. Though there were some more walking paths we could have taken (well, I could have -- Pat wanted no part of them), we both felt we'd done the tower justice. We headed back to Keystone, this time taking Highway 90, and made good time. We got there shortly after 4 pm, and had thought that we might take a local antique train that was near the hotel. But the next train seems to be at 11 am tomorrow, and since that pretty much kills the middle of the day (it takes two hours, the sign says), we probably won't do that.
We walked down the main street of town and checked out some jewelry stores. Pat has been on a quest to find an appropriate charm for her charm bracelet to commemorate this trip. This is made trickier by the fact that her charm bracelet is gold, not silver. At one of the stores, she found an eagle pendant that the shop clerk put a jump ring on to make it into a charm. So much for that quest -- now she just needs to find the right catsitting present for her catsitter.
After that, we had dinner at a nearby restaurant. They had all-you-can-eat prime rib and ribs and buffalo roast (I forgot to try that) and it was quite good -- better than I'd thought at first glance.
And then back to the hotel to type this. And so, as they say, to bed.
Friday, 22 September
It rained all day Thursday, so I'd hoped it would be nice on Friday, but no luck. We headed out in the rain at 6 pm, or shortly thereafter. It was supposed to be 6, but Pat couldn't find her car keys. They eventually turned out to be on her desk, where she'd checked several times before, but they had slipped under a piece of hardware, and were black on black. Or maybe the cats borrowed them and just got around to replacing them.
Driving was really pretty unpleasant, so we stopped a bit earlier than we'd planned, in Mankato. We stayed at a Days Inn, and I didn't bother to bring in the computer.
Saturday, 23 September
Spent most of the day working our way west on highway 90. It rained most of the day. The landscape went from flat to gently rolling. The most notable scenic item was the zillions of billboards for the Mitchell Corn Palace ("Corn-sider going there") and Wall Drug. Around 3 pm (best guess), we reached the turnoff for the Badlands State Park. There's a scenic loop that parallels 90 (sort of) and takes you through a lot of the best parts of the Badlands. Since it had stopped raining (though it was cold and very windy), we paid our $15 admission and drove through.
It was well worth it. The scenery was breathtaking -- all sorts of peaks and spires, then haystack-shaped mounds, then more peaks and spires. The peaks were often layered in rust and ocher and white. The plain brown ones looked like nothing so much as giant sand castles. We stopped at a couple of the scenic lookouts, and did one short scenic walk, and decided to come back the next day to do it properly. We also stopped at the interpretive center, where Pat bought a bunch of books. This trip is all research for her current book, after all. At one point we stopped to look at a prairie dog colony. Prairie dogs are awfully cute out on the prairie, though I expect they'd be annoying vermin if they were digging up my front yard. Then we found a hotel in Wall (a Best Western), and arranged to stay there for two nights. It turns out Wall is named that because of the 60-mile wall that edges the Badlands, though it keeps eroding away. (I'd never realized that Wall Drug was named after a town, let alone that the town was named after anything other than a Mr. Wall.)
We wandered around Wall Drug (it takes up an entire block and reportedly employs a third of the workers in Wall), then had dinner at the Cactus Cafe. I tried to get online without any luck -- they claimed to have free wireless, but I couldn't get a signal -- so I read for a couple of hours and went to bed.
Pat and I are mostly compatible, except for bedtimes. She thinks that 10 pm is the middle of the night and 8 pm is about time to go to bed, whereas I only recently started going to bed as early as 10:30, mostly as a result of getting up at 6:30 am to exercise. So she goes to bed at 8 or so, and I read or do computer stuff. I've been getting up around 8, and though she gets up earlier, she can read or play computer games until I wake up. So it's mostly been working out. (I asked Pat if it was okay to post this on the Web, and she rather indignantly said that she normally goes to bed at 9 pm, but it's been 8 pm because of the time change.)
Sunday, 24 September
Pat wanted to go to Sunday services, and there was a Catholic church within walking distance, so she went to the 8 am service and I went to a nearby restaurant and had breakfast. They had a breakfast buffet that had rubber eggs and flexible sausage, but the fruit was lovely, so I had two platesful of strawberries, melon, and pineapple. Then we headed back to the Badlands National Park.
The pass we'd paid for the day before was good for a week. This time we stopped at all the scenic views, and did most of the marked walks. The one through the Saddle Pass turned out to be more of a challenge than we'd expected. The description said "Strenuous." What it didn't say was "steep up-and-down grade through narrow passes in rock walls with glutinous mud underfoot." (Well, it had rained the two days before.) It also didn't say "path poorly marked, especially in some of the most interesting (i.e., scary) passages." Once I set myself on the path, though, I was determined to keep going to the end. Also, as long as I kept going, I didn't have to think about the fact that I was going to have to make my way down those steep passages I'd managed to scramble up. Pat, who has a trick knee, rather sensibly decided to head back after about two-thirds of the distance. I pressed on until I got to the point where I thought the path was about to meet up with another trail -- one we didn't intend to take.
I was rather pleased that I managed to make my way down all the steep slopes without ever falling into the mud. My shoes and the bottom of my pants were rather splashed, but so it goes. The surprising thing was that the sides of the passes seemed to be dirt rather than rock. I suppose that helps explain the sand castle-type appearance of much of the Badlands. It's the brown ones that seem to be more dirtlike, with the rust and ocher ones being rock, albeit soft rock.
We had lunch in a restaurant in the park and planned out our afternoon. There was a ten-mile circle walk through a portion of the park, but Pat didn't think she was up for that -- the description said it would take five hours, and while I thought we could probably go faster than that, it did sound a bit extreme. But with the help of one of the guides, we found a place where we could park the car that would take us through a circle route that was only five miles long, so we did that.
Because the soil was mostly clay, and still wet in places from the previous days' rain, we ended up with very muddy shoes, and more mud on our pants, but neither of us fell down. Hey, I take my minor triumphs where I can. The route was mostly flat, but it got us up close and personal with a lot of the peaks (well, their bases), and we confirmed that an awful lot of the Badlands did, in fact, appear to be made of dirt. ("I went to the Badlands and all I saw was dirt," Pat said.)
After some more looking at scenic views, we headed back to the hotel. We had dinner at the same restaurant that I'd had breakfast at. Nothing impressive, but it was food. This time I went to the hotel's lounge to see if I could get a wireless signal. I could, but the woman from the hotel desk was watching Cold Case, and I couldn't manage to tune it out. So I went back to the room, and discovered that I did have a signal still, and took a quick look at e-mail, and got caught up on reading LJ.
Monday, 25 September
We started out fairly early, heading for Mount Rushmore. We stopped at the Gutzon Borglum museum that we'd been seeing signs (both on billboards and on things that looked like the trailer part of trucks) for the last couple of hundred miles. It was worth stopping at, actually. There were many examples of Borglum's sculpture and paintings (as a painter, he was a fine sculptor, IMO). After I saw a few of his sculptures, I said to myself that I bet Rodin was an influence on him, and shortly thereafter, it said that he'd studied under Rodin. I don't know a great deal about art, but the similarity was striking. The museum also covered tidbits that were left out elsewhere, like the fact that Borglum's father was married to Ida, and then when Ida's sister Christina moved out to Utah to join them, she married Borglum's father as well, in the Mormon fashion. Christina was Gutzon Borglum's mother, but when the father left the Mormon church and moved out to Chicago, Christina left because she knew he couldn't be married to two women. Nothing more was said about what happened to her, but Gutzon Borglum left home at age seventeen, having run away (and returned or been returned, that's not clear) several times before. I do wonder what was going on that wasn't told.
After that, we headed for the actual monument. It's...big. Each of the presidents' heads is 60 or so feet high. No matter how cynical I feel about some things, this was really impressive. It's amusing to think that the whole thing started as something that would increase tourist traffic to South Dakota. It worked, too -- Mount Rushmore gets over three million visitors a year. The visitor center there is fairly new, dating from the 1990s, and it's beautiful. There's a walk all around the area, and there was a guided walk with one of the park rangers that we took. We then went down 240 steps to the sculptor's studio, where we saw the one extant working model of the sculpture and a model of the Hall of Records, and then up 120 more steps back to the beginning.
By now it was around 4 pm, and we were tired, so we decided it was time to find a hotel room. We ended up at the Holiday Inn Express because it was in the middle of town (Keystone) and because Pat has a soft spot for Holiday Inn Expresses. They had free wireless, so I fired up LJ and started reading from most recent to oldest, since I had gotten caught up to present time the day before. Which is how I managed to find out about Mike from
laurel's LJ, where she'd made an entirely (to me, then) oblique comment that I hoped I'd misinterpreted. But the next comment down was from sraun's, which had a link to the Making Light announcement. I spent the rest of the evening, other than a short break for dinner at Subway, reading tributes and crying. Pat very kindly asked if I'd like to go back to town right away for the funeral, but I said I didn't know right now. And then, reading on, I saw that the memorial service wasn't going to be until October, so the question was moot.Tuesday, September 26
Today, as I write this. The hotel claimed to provide "Continental breakfast plus," which in this case meant hard-boiled eggs and yogurt. The yogurt was the sweetened kind that I'd rather not have, but it was also the stir-fruit-from-the-bottom kind, so I just ate the top part without stirring up the fruit. (I'm still low-carbing even though I'm maintaining my weight, so I'm trying to avoid carbohydrates, especially starches and sugars. Fruits I'm generally okay with.)
After breakfast, we headed north to go to Devils Tower (the apostrophe got lost at some point, so now the apostrophe-less version is official). Not only was this another impressive scenic sight, it was also another state -- I don't think I've ever been to Wyoming before. It's about 110 miles from Keystone to Devils Tower, but it took us somewhat over two hours to get there. This was mostly my fault, since I'd chosen a route that was supposed to be scenic (and was, in fact), but was two lanes most of the way, and not terribly fast. We got there without incident, so my navigating worked.
I'd never heard of Devils Tower until I saw Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Pat has never seen the movie, so she was amused when I told her about the bit where Roy Neary knows about the path that the other woman doesn't, because he was doing sculpture and she was only drawing. The tower is about 840 feet from the ground level, but it's just under a mile above sea level. I knew the ground had been rising as we drove, but I hadn't realized it had been that much. The tower itself looks like nothing so much as a giant blob of clay that someone made into a, um, what's the term for a thing that's like a cylinder except that it's got a larger circumference at the bottom than at the top? Whatever that's called, it looked like a one of those that someone had run giant fingers vertically down all the sides. In fact, it looks like this.
First we listened to a ranger's talk about the history of the tower -- Indian legends, and the first climbers, and current climbing methods. Then we walked the path around the base of the tower, about a mile-and-a-quarter in length. Though there were some more walking paths we could have taken (well, I could have -- Pat wanted no part of them), we both felt we'd done the tower justice. We headed back to Keystone, this time taking Highway 90, and made good time. We got there shortly after 4 pm, and had thought that we might take a local antique train that was near the hotel. But the next train seems to be at 11 am tomorrow, and since that pretty much kills the middle of the day (it takes two hours, the sign says), we probably won't do that.
We walked down the main street of town and checked out some jewelry stores. Pat has been on a quest to find an appropriate charm for her charm bracelet to commemorate this trip. This is made trickier by the fact that her charm bracelet is gold, not silver. At one of the stores, she found an eagle pendant that the shop clerk put a jump ring on to make it into a charm. So much for that quest -- now she just needs to find the right catsitting present for her catsitter.
After that, we had dinner at a nearby restaurant. They had all-you-can-eat prime rib and ribs and buffalo roast (I forgot to try that) and it was quite good -- better than I'd thought at first glance.
And then back to the hotel to type this. And so, as they say, to bed.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-09-27 03:23 am (UTC)Thanks for passing on that tidbit about Wall and the naming thereof.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-27 05:38 am (UTC)I had a scandalous moment of personal history with Wall Drug, but I won't be posting it to the Internet.
K.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-27 06:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-27 03:59 pm (UTC)We noticed the Devil's Tower on our way to Kansas City and thought about stopping there, but it was 100 miles out of our way so we gave it a miss. Of course, "Close Encounters" hadn't been made yet.
I do remember the proliferating signs for Wall Drug -- we were seeing them as far away as Iowa. On that same trip we also saw the house where Jesse James was killed in St. Joseph, Missouri, and the battle site for Little Big Horn in Montana. Oh, and we also stopped at a "roadside attraction" in South Dakota that consisted of a teeny souvenir hut and a 60-foot tall plaster prairie dog.
I love road trips. Thank you for posting!
no subject
Date: 2006-09-30 03:01 am (UTC)We passed a similar place on the way out of the Badlands Loop, but it was only a 20-foot-tall plaster prairie dog. It was an unlikely shade of pink, with brown accents.