Traveling-with-TLC

June 7-12: Bison and Bucket Lists and National Treasures

We love Western South Dakota. Great weather, really cool people/places to visit, and beautiful country side.

We arrived at Custer State Park late in the day without a reservation. It’s much better to plan in advance because the campgrounds fill up. There is one campground that is first come-first served, but you still have to go through the phone-in reservation system. There is no cell service at that campground, so you must use their land-line. After standing around on hold FOREVER (!), we gave up and drove to another campground. We used both of our phones to call the reservation line to wait on hold, and in the meantime were fortunate enough to meet the campground hosts. The hosts had one site they could give unorganized people like us for one night. We took it and waited about 45 minutes on hold and 25 minutes of talking to a very unqualified reservation person to book a few more nights at yet a third campground. Good grief! I really expected Kristi Noem’s state to have it together. They do not. We wanted to extend our stay in South Dakota, so we found a private campground in Spearfish to book without the rigamarole. Chris’ campground was magnificent!!

The campground with the super nice hosts that were able to book us for one night was at Stockade Lake. Oh my goodness, what a beautiful lake! I can’t believe we didn’t take any pictures of it. Here are a few online shots.

The obvious place to go first was Mt. Rushmore. For once, we did the obvious and went to Mt. Rushmore. It was raining, so the Presidents looked a littlesad.

Our second day in South Dakota was epic. We were told multiple times we must go to Wall Drug Store while in South Dakota. It was on the way to Badlands National Park, so we went to Wall. Wall Drug has an intense billboard marketing plan beginning about 40 miles from Wall. It’s the kind of place we usually avoid at all costs. We expected to be underwhelmed, but we weren’t! It was kind of cool:

On the way to the Badlands National Park, Ted asked me what else is on my bucket list. I said I didn’t know. About thirty seconds later, we saw a sign for a Sod House Museum. Ah, I’ve always wanted to see a Sod House. Ta dah, a bucket list item!

Such a cool place. This was an original sod house, built in 1909 and restored in the sixties. It was wonderful to be able to walk into the house without ropes or barriers.

As a bonus, the house was surrounded by a Prairie Dog Town with a population of white prairie dogs. Such interesting animals and they are so much fun to watch. If excited, the prairie dogs shake their tails rapidly, but if really excited they could jump upright and “bark”. They reminded me of Pentecostals, jumping up to shout “hallelujah”.

We were blessed with perfect weather to see Badlands National Park

On the way back to camp we saw plenty of Bison and beautiful scenery. We spent a couple of blissful hours watching birds. We added quite a few birds to our trip list including Dicksissal, Curlew, Mountain Plover, Lark Bunting, Pintail and many more. All in all, a very fun day.