dakota road trip, day 2

after saying good bye to baby horses and little barn kittens in the morning, we loaded into the car for a day of driving across south dakota. the big sky and rolling fields of grass and grain are beautiful. the flatness goes on forever, the horizon virtually unimpeded. the grazing beef cattle had babies with them everywhere we looked. the drive was gorgeous.

not so gorgeous, but maybe kinda cool (?), was the world's largest pheasant. well done, south dakota.


we made a stop at the south dakota capitol building in pierre to stamp our capitols passport book (serious nerd cred, you guys)....


....and then kept driving west ward, counting all the hundreds of billboards for wall drug. (see our official tally keeper and her giant souvenir pencil from the laura ingalls wilder homestead? nothing says prairie homestead like a giant overpriced pink pencil).
 

of course our next destination was wall drug (which could easily be called america's capitol of obnoxious grossness, and would not be found in the passport book)! with trinkets and garbage at every turn, we knew the kids would be begging for us to buy them everything, so instead they took all the coins they earned at odd jobs this past month and bought themselves their own junk. (see pink pencil above for a perfect example of garbage they bought with their own money).  it was great, and seriously decreased the burden of whining. check out these goofy kids and their coin purses...


after more than enough time at wall drug (visit complete with free ice water, locally made ice cream, buffalo burgers, and donuts to-go for the following morning, in addition to a tiny jackalope for me), we drove a few minutes south to enter the badlands (but first had to wait for some bison to cross the road, which was AWESOME).



the badlands is super cool. david and i fell in love with that park when we first visited it together on our 2006 road trip/move to california. we spent less than 24 hours there in the fall of 2006, and we said to eachother that some day we'd be back, and then we'd spend more time and do more things. we made good on that promise this year, with two nights spent in the park allowing for 2 days of badlands awesomeness.

i mean, come on.


and the best part this year (besides all the wild animals there were absolutely everywhere...), the best part for SURE, was taking the kids and watching the kids react with total joy and amazement. they immediately wanted to get out of the car and down into the badlands to climb and crawl everywhere. surprisingly, this is allowed in this park, so we let them.

down they go, in the late day, to explore....

 

it was only part of a day, but that first day in the badlands did not disappoint. flowers in bloom, and sunsets galore from the back porch of our cool little cabin.