[Christina] Day 10: Escape from the Great Plains

We awakened at our campground and finished driving through Badlands National Park.  The scenery was magnificent, as one might well expect. [Elizabeth sidebar: the morning offered a few scattered bison, but nothing like what we saw last night. That nasty thunderstorm was definitely the best part of the afternoon yesterday, since it steered us into such magnificence]

A highlight of the visit, though, was the visitor center.  I bought a teach-yourself-Lakota book which turned out to be excellent, and Elizabeth got to chat with the folks in the fossil prep lab. [Elizabeth sidebar: it's so much fun to talk to other paleo people. We traded a few tricks, and I told them my experiences with a method they were thinking about trying out. Yay for science and random one-off collaborations!]

Beyond that, however, this was easily our most grueling day of travel yet [Elizabeth sidebar: the drive was made significantly better, as I managed to turn Christina into a fan of one of my favorite authors, and we listened to an audiobook that I love].  We drove west across South Dakota, the monotonous hay fields interrupted by only a handful of crumbling towns which made places like Ozona and Sonora look like New York City.  We dipped south a few tens of miles to a state park along the Missouri river just so we could say we had gone to Nebraska and done something there. [Elizabeth sidebar: this would've been much easier if we'd not been determined to go to Nebraska. But hey, we went, and now I only have 2 more states to visit: Iowa, which might happen tomorrow, and Alaska. So that's pretty neat. Also - there's a stark difference between Western South Dakota and Eastern South Dakota - namely, in the west, they grow hay, and in the east they grow corn...]

That evening, we made a brief visit to Sioux Falls.  We gassed up the car [yay power prius!] and made a quick stop at IHOP where we selected and then consumed our favored calorie delivery vehicles.  We then drove another half-hour across the Minnesota border and stopped at a cheap hotel.  There, we did laundry, griped about the terrible wifi [which wasn't *that* terrible], and rested for the night.  But, we were happy to know that we had finally crossed from the Great Plains and into the Midwest.