Yesterday (Sunday, July 31st) we pulled out of Pleasant Valley Farm and Cabins in the Black Hills and moved Eastward to the Badlands. We listened to the sermon in the van for “church”, oh how we miss being in community at church in New Hampshire! Only one more Sunday to go! Before going to the Badlands we decided to take a quick pit stop in the random attraction of Wall Drug. I mean, when you see billboards for it, you have to stop, right? That’s definitely their marketing strategy. I was proud we fell for none of their ploys except using clean, free restrooms, doing a quick walk through and playing in their new “backyard” space for a hot minute.
Now for the real destination! Badlands National Park. I remember this from the cross country trip we did when I was a kid. I think we got to see it at sundown which is truly spectacular, but I’m glad we at least spent a good part of the day learning about this interesting area and exploring it for ourselves. Here’s Janseman at the first overlook.
A little farther down the road we found one of the few picnic spots that was designed to provide some shade in this very open-to-the-elements park. While I made sandwiches, the boys ran around exploring and scrambling up some of the unique hills around. The Badlands look like it is sand that would just crumble away, but it’s solid to stand on, but definitely can be slippery. They developed a sliding game to descend the different little peaks.
We had a very exciting sighting (right after a very frustrating couple minutes of the big boys being ridiculous to each other so I had jumped from the front seat into the back between the captain’s chairs and made Tavin go up front, all while Doug was driving…sometimes you just gotta take matters into your own hands!). Doug has wanted to see a Big Horned Sheep since we learned about them in Colorado. Penn amazingly spotted three of them as we were just driving along these hills. Can you see all three??
A pretty cool discovery at our final national park of the trip. We also enjoyed discovering the Visitor’s Center as they let you watch the paleontologists that are working on fossils found in the Badlands. And these are just shells or tiny snail-like objects, we got to see huge skulls from saber-tooth tiger type animals. The lady working was scraping sand from the teeth of the animal and said to us that we were the first people to ever see those teeth. How incredible!!
We bought our final sticker to add to our car top carrier assortment. A total of 13 parks! What a thing to get to reflect on all we’ve seen these past six weeks and just the variety that lies within our country’s boundaries.
On our drive to the exit of the park we did a quick trail for one more outlook into the vastness of the Badlands. Some lady offered to take a picture of the boys and I. Well, sure!
It was a four hour drive to our crash pad…the last hotel night of this long trip! The last six nights will all be with friends. Yay! We have definitely perfected our quick unpack/repack for these hotels though. And the boys all know what to do. It’s pretty impressive! Check out this handsome helper.
Until the next post!
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