Badlands & more

Last night, Nathan and I got home from a quick trip to South Dakota. It was a fun and quick little road trip to add more national parks to our list.

We started out on Wednesday morning and drove to Devil's Tower in Wyoming. Devil's Tower was the country's first National Monument and was pretty impressive. We did the short trail around the tower...enjoying the massive boulder field, the prayer flags/fabric strips, and the amazing geologic formations. We saw climbers in the distance and wondered about what must have been a massive wind storm that had snapped many trees recently. (We'd have asked a ranger but couldn't find one while we were there.)

From there, we drove into Rapid City, SD, found our AirBNB, and walked a couple blocks to a great brew pub where we ate way too much. Seriously. It was delicious but just too much.

Thursday morning, we enjoyed the wonderful coffee shop literally on the other side of the building from our AirBNB then set out for the South Dakota Air & Space Museum, which was an unexpected surprise that we discovered on a billboard while driving into Rapid City. We didn't take many photos but enjoyed their extensive collection...

From there, we continued on to Badlands National Park. We were sad to discover that the Notch Trail was closed (for our protection?) but went ahead and hiked a portion of the Castle Trail before continuing on to lunch at the Cedar Pass Lodge Restaurant (we recommend the Famous Indian Tacos on fry bread), some time learning at the visitors center and then some more wandering in the park.

Mid-afternoon, we ventured out of the park to Wall Drug, where Nathan tried their famous 5 cent coffee (it was not to his standards, lol). We browsed a bit before heading back into the park. (We'd actually been to Wall Drug when we moved from Washington to North Carolina back in 1998. It hadn't changed much, lol, but we appreciated all of their many roadside signs for miles and miles.) 

Throughout the day, I joked that I needed to get pictures of all three boys' college mascots...ram (for Noah and CSU), bear (for Asher and UNC) and buffalo (for Micah and CU Boulder). We saw actual buffalo and rams but had to settle for a stuffed bear at Wall Drug. :) We did see plenty of prairie dogs (which we decided to dub the "bears of the rodent kingdom" or "dirt bears"), lol. Does that count? And. On Wednesday, at one of our stops for gas, Nathan found a toy T-Rex that I adopted and brought along on our travels. 

After sunset, we got dinner in Wall, SD (at the Salty Steer) then drove back to our AirBNB in Rapid City.

Friday morning we checked out of our fabulous AirBNB (top three photos below) and hit our favored coffee shop, Harriet & Oak (bottom photo below). 

We took a scenic drive through Custer State Park and stopped in Wind Cave National Park. Unfortunately, the cave tours aren't going right now (which I knew in advance--they're replacing the elevators) so we hit the visitors center exhibits, saw a natural entrance to the caves and did the Cold Brook Canyon hike.

The hike was lovely. We appreciated the utter quiet and having the trail entirely to ourselves...aside from the plentiful prairie dogs and the bison waiting for us at our car when we got back. (The antelope photo was from inside Custer State Park.) We were also quite impressed by the information we read at the visitors center and may have to make a repeat visit to actually do a cave tour in the future.

(Side note to say that we've been to Mt Rushmore years ago with the boys and years before that while we were moving cross-country, so we didn't bother stopping there on this trip. We'd also opted to tour Jewel Cave with the boys on that trip but hadn't been to Wind Cave (my guess is that we chose Jewel Cave due to maybe a shorter tour, more appropriate for the boys' ages at the time).)

We then drove into Hot Springs, SD and had a late lunch at Two Cows Creamery before getting on the road for home. Along the way, we stopped for Nathan's afternoon coffee (at a coffee shop in Chadron, NE that was apparently "out" of coffee, lol) and made an attempt to see Scotts Bluff National Monument. We knew the visitors center would be closed by the time we got there but thought maybe we'd still be able to drive the loop. Nope. We settled for this photo...

From there, we stopped for dinner in Kimball, NE and made it home finally around 9pm. Whew. 

So, that was our quick trip. It was lovely.