June 15, 2013

Custer, South Dakota
Beaver Lake Campground


With storm warnings swirling all around us, we take off while a light rain falls.  Again, with the little amount of traffic, my nerves are much calmer, even in the rain.  We looked it up, SD has about 814K people in 77K sq. miles.  Metro Atlanta has 5 million people in 8,480 sq. miles!  No wonder I feel suffocated there.  It's so nice to have room to breathe...

But the rain cleared quickly and blue skies took over.  We drove down a big hill to the Missouri River, crossed the bridge and suddenly we were in hill country again.

 

Weeeeeeeeee!

 



I wouldn't usually blog about a driving day, but this one was special.  We left early enough to make a couple of stops on the way.   The first one was a Minuteman Missile site. We were too late to get a ticket down into the command center, but the film and displayed items and photos were worth the stop.  We learned that the sites were never secret, they wanted the enemy to know we were armed. Hum.  Anna and Alex took a little quiz and earned their Jr. Ranger badges (it's a national park).  They are Cold War informed now. One of the other visitors made it even more fun, he was Russian!  G used his camera to take his photo in front of the t-shirts displaying a missile blasting through a Soviet flag.  A little fun for his friends back home. 

 

Learning Cold War facts in a 1950s kitchen,

 

The red sites are active.  The black sites are inactive. Yeah, sure.;-)

 

 

Painting on one of the silo blast doors.  There were many different, "fun" designs.

 

They even gave the Russian guy this map!

 

 

The next stop was Badlands National Park.  We could see hints of it from the interstate, but once we got there, wow, just wow.  I took so many pictures that G said we'll need to get an extra hard drive to store them.  I won't post them all, but here are some highlights.

 

Bad dog in the Badlands.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Looks like a showdown.

 

 

 

 

 

 

It felt like we were inside a giant sand castle.

 

 

He didn't really...just a funny shot.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There's a moon there somewhere.

 

We had a much easier time getting our covered wagon through the Badlands, than the pioneers did.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once out of the park, we must stop at Wall Drug.  A little tourist trap in Wall, SD.  We got out only buying 5-cent coffee and pie.  But, oh, there was much to see.

 

 

Yeee haw