It was another bad weather day. How many is that now? At this point I am missing sunny Florida, where we seldom have a day without sunshine. Great place to live. We left the hotel in fog at 8:15 and 63 degrees, and headed for Theodore Roosevelt National Park. All of my photos today were taken in that park. The colors would have been brilliant if the sun had been shining, but it is what it is. The sky was overcast all day long.

Also called the Bad Lands, this park is built through the Painted Canyon. I will have to check with Bob Degraff and find out if it resembles the Painted Desert in Arizona. The rangers told us that the drive through the park takes about an hour and a half, but it really takes about 2 hours, if you are going to stop, enjoy the views and take photos. And it would have taken even longer if there had been more traffic. But I guess the weather kept some people away. The colors of the canyon are an interesting mix of tans, pinks, and reds, with dark green juniper, silver green sage and the dogwood trees found all over the park. There are a lot of places to stop and enjoy the vistas and we stopped at all of them. At one point I realized that I had been getting out, taking a bunch of photos and getting back into the car. This is a disease I can't seem to cure. So I put my camera away and decided to just look and enjoy.

The park is full of wildlife and we saw a lot of it. We saw cute little brown prairie dogs, graceful deer, sleek wild horses of many colors, and huge and powerful buffalo. None of these animals were threatened by the cars or people like me taking photos of them. One black horse just walked by our car like we were not even there. I could almost reach out and touch him. They were all living off the land, grazing on the grass, and we wondered what they ate in the winter, when the ground was covered with snow.

After leaving the park, we headed south for Rapid City, SD. The road was a straight shot on a two-lane highway, so flat and straight that at times we could see 5 miles or more ahead of us. We drove through 200 miles of ranch country…flat pastures lush with green grass…with clusters of cattle here and there. And it rained on us, and there was evidence that it had stormed heavily before we arrived, because there was ice (hail?) along the side of the road. And planted in the middle of many of the fields were oil wells…brand new pumps rhythmically hammering up and down, loading up the tanks that sat nearby. Steve tells me that the Dakotas are the new frontier for the oil industry. How exciting it must be for a rancher or farmer to find out that there is oil under his land.

The drive took us through an area where towns are few and far between, and very, very small…no gas stations, no stores, just a few old houses. One exception was Belle Fourche where you can buy supplies at Round-up Building Center or Ranch Mart, stay at the Bunk House Motel, Eat at the Branding Iron and have your hair cut at Hair Country. I sense a theme here. Hmmm. And everyone dresses pretty much the same, women and men alike, in genes and boots. In Bowman, you can even go to the cooler at the Frontier Travel Center and get a supply of night crawlers.

We reached Rapid City around 4:15 and spent about half an hour trying to check in…they messed up our reservation. Tomorrow…Mt. Rushmore. Hopefully this visit will be better than my last back in 1966, when the mountain was obscured in a heavy fog. I really want to see this monument up close. Then we head off to Minnesota and Wisconsin.