We said goodbye to Keystone around 10:30 a.m. and headed for one of the Badlands National Park Visitor Centers. All three of us spent a solid day traveling to the sites and overlooks and hiking some of the Badlands last July when we did a road trip across South Dakota so we were mostly looking to get our passport stamped.
The stop was a great reminder of the colors and textures of the landscape of the Badlands. They are eerie and awesome at the same time and come up surprisingly unexpectedly as you are cruising highway 90. Badlands National Park is nearly 380 square miles and has three different areas with lots of things to do. There are a couple of visitor centers, several beautiful loop drives with pull-off areas to park and view or take a hike, and hikes for most every level of hiker or even hiker/camper.
As I said, we had done a lot of the park last year so we did a short hike, got our passports stamped, and ate our lunch in the sun (it was a very pleasant day, sunny but not to hot).
From there we headed to the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site. Most anyone that has traveled in South Dakota has heard of Wall Drug in Wall, SD. The Minuteman Missile National Historic Site is just a few miles east of Wall. While I understand the role missiles played during the cold war and beyond and I think very highly of the troops in every branch of service that commits their all to keep our nation free and safe, I admit that a site dedicated to missiles isn’t high on my list of must-see sites. Nevertheless we visited it, got our passport stamped, chatted with a few people and headed out again to Sioux Falls.
This is the second time we’ve stayed in downtown Sioux Falls and I’ve gotta say that the city has done great things continuing to renew the downtown and keep it safe, vibrant, and interesting. The city walk along the Big Sioux River is nice and there are some great restaurants. We walked across the river from our hotel and picked up dinner from Crave, which was quite yummy. We stayed at the Holiday Inn Sioux Falls – City Center and ran into an interesting convention going on. I was wondering why there were so many older white people around. I mean, I’m an older white person so no issue, but the hotel was sorta filled with us, which has not been the case on the rest of our trip. On my wander around to find coffee on the main floor the next morning I realized what the draw was. It was a Vestlandslag meeting. When I saw the word I immediately thought Scandinavia, although that’s all that came to mind so I googled it. I found that it is some kind of Norwegian-American group from a multitude of areas in Norway. By the time I’d figured out what was going on most of the folks had settled into one of several large meeting rooms. Since I’m half Scandinavian I thought it was an interesting side note to run into their annual meeting during our trip. Oh well, there isn’t enough time in the day to participate in everything!
Tomorrow is the last day of our trip and we’ll hit the Minnesota border pretty quickly in the morning, then on to Pipestone National Monument. Thanks for sticking with me this far!
