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Day 3: Mitchell, SD to Hill City, SD
We woke up pretty early and ate cereal and some good chocolate chip coffee cake the that my mom brought along. If any of you know my mom, you will know that she is one of the most prepared people in the entire world. She spent a lot of time making sure that we had everything we would need.
I know this trip is a little hard for all of us because we are in such close quarters and there is so much driving but I think we are handling it all pretty well. My biggest problem is that I keep forgetting which bag I put everything in. I spent at least a half an hour last night trying to locate my eye mask for sleeping. And then this morning I realized that the joystick to my precious Pac Man game had fallen off, which means I can not longer play it. Maybe it will fall out of one of the overhead cupboards during our next big turn.
We left the RV park around 10:00. It takes a while to unplug and let the water and sewage out. My parents took care of that. I will have to learn how to do that.
We stopped at a rest stop overlooking the Missouri River with an amazing statue called Dignity, sculpted in 2016 to commemorate the 125th anniversary of South Dakota's statehood.
We also passed fields and fields of sunflowers and lots of signs for Wall Drugstore.
On our way to the Badlands National Park we decided to stop at a little place called the Prairie Homestead, which has an original sod home that was built in 1909 by Ed and Alice Brown. This homestead is also home to the only known wild white prairie dogs in the whole world. The kids found the white prairie dogs much more interesting than the actual homestead, but they did enjoy going into the root cellar. We learned a little about the Homestead Act of 1862 and then we looked up more information when we got back in the RV. The Homestead Act, which was signed by Abraham Lincoln, allowed eligible people (any US citizen or soon to be citizen who had never borne arms against the US government) to buy 160 acres of land from the US government for $18. If you managed to cultivate the land and survive, after five years you were awarded the land.
Although the Homestead Act actually lasted until 1974, there was not much homesteading after 1934. Four million settlers applied to be homesteaders between 1862 and 1974 but only 1.6 million actually succeeded. In fact, there was a sign at the Prairie Homestead that said, "A common remark by homesteaders was that the government bet you 160 acres of land against $18 that you will starve to death before you live on the land for five years."
Another major problem of this act was that it took the land from the Native Americans who were already living on this land. The Native Americans were forced onto reservations to make way for the homesteaders.
There is a great middle grade/young adult novel about homesteading by Kirby Larson called Hattie Big Sky which is based on the life of the author's great-great-grandmother and tells the story of a 16 year-old girl who goes to Montana to take over her uncle's homesteading land. It won a Newbery Honor award in 2007. Laura Ingalls Wilder's parents were also homesteaders in South Dakota. Willa Cather, George Washington Carver, Virgil Earp (older brother of Wyatt) and Lawrence Welk are other famous homesteaders.
We finally made our way to the Badlands Loop. We got in to the Badlands National Park for free thanks to the free 4th grade national park pass that the National Park Foundation offers. Just google "Every Kid Outdoors" and you should be able to get it. Thank you, Allison Vogt, for reminding me about this. The pass allows up to three adults and all the children in a vehicle into any of the US 2000 national parks for free. All you have to do is go the website, print out the ticket, and show it at the first national park you go to. They give you a pass which the fourth grader needs to sign and then you can use it anywhere. It lasts from September 1st to August 31st every year.
I didn't know much about the Badlands before today. The Badlands is a national park with 244,000 acres. The land formations look like something out a Star Wars movie and were created 75 million years ago. They are made of soft sedimentary rocks that has been eroded by wind and water. The Badlands were named "mako sica" by the Lakota, which basically means land bad.
We did most of the northern loop and stopped once to eat a little picnic lunch near the visitor's center and at three other times to walk around and take photos. It was slightly scary to watch your children walking around. I don't think I would have felt nearly as comfortable if my parents and Ellie weren't there. My mom explained to all of us that many people have died in recent years from attempting to take selfies in places like this, so we all needed to be very careful. The only injury occurred when Alex hit his head on one of those explanation boards. We spent about three hours in the park before heading to Wall Drug Store. I know that lots of people spend way more time in the Badlands. We should have waited in line to see to the Ben Reifel visitor center, but with four fairly young kids, we realized that we did all that we needed to do. I've read that it's breathtaking to see the sunrise or sunset there, but there was no way that was going to happen in an RV.
We felt like we needed to go to Wall Drug just because there are so many signs (they have 333 billboards total) telling us to go there. Wall Drug is a drug store in the town of Wall, SD, which has a teeny population of 818. As many as 20,000 people visit Wall Drug a day during peak season, about two million visitors a year. I'm not sure if there were than many people there today. It didn't seem that crowded.
Wall Drug was started in 1931 by a man named Ted Hustead. Business was slow and he was thinking of giving up by the summer of 1936. That's when Ted's wife suggested they offer free ice to people traveling through town. When Mount Rushmore opened in 1941, Wall Drug because even more popular. Now it's basically a huge tourist trap full of souvenirs, but it does have an impressive Western art collection of oil paintings in the restaurant that my mom and I enjoyed looking at. Elie bought some fudge and my parents and the kids got ice cream. I got my free ice and my mom got her 5 cent coffee, just as the signs promised. We also went out back to take some photos by the big jackalope. We shockingly did not find anyone selling ninja stars. I think our friend Derek from the RV park in Mitchell might have been pulling out leg.
We didn't stay too long at Wall Drug and then made our way to our next RV campground, the KOA Palmer Gulch. On our way we passed by Mount Rushmore, which was pretty exciting for the kids but not as exciting for Ellie because the creator of Mount Rushmore, Gutzon Borglum, is considered by most accounts to be a racist man who had ties to the KKK. She told us about his background and also talked to us about the four presidents and their shortcomings.
We were blown away when we arrived at the KOA Palmer Gulch. Since my only RV park experience was the Dakota Campground in Mitchell, I had no idea what to expect with a KOA (Campground of America). This KOA is like a mini city nestled in a valley in the Black Hills surrounded by pine trees. It has a two gift shops, an ice cream shop, a coffee shop, a pizza place, a jumpy pillow, five playgrounds, a water slide, a pool, a splash pad, a mini-golf area, movie nights, go carts, and rocks to climb on. They offer trail rides on horseback and have some sort of chuckwagon dinner that was not offered on Monday nights. I suppose we wouldn't have gone anyway because of Covid. In fact, we couldn't do most of the exciting offerings because of Covid. The KOA Palmer Gulch also has really nice shower/bathrooms which are called Comfort Stations. It also has cabins to rent and tent spots if you don't have an RV It's about 20 minutes away from Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse so it's a perfect place to stay if you are ever thinking about coming this way.
The campground was huge and the rows and rows of RVs were fascinating to walk through. We were placed in row Lincoln, so appropriate for this Lincoln School going family. Our 32 foot RV looked positively tiny next to the others. Some of them had purple lights inside and two bathrooms and looked like a rock star might walk out at any moment.
The boys had fun jumping on the jumpy pillow, which fortunately wasn't too crowded. We couldn't use the pool because they only allow 77 people to use the pool per hour because of COVID-19 and you had to sign up in the morning to get your pool ticket.
We decided to go to the special KOA Mexican Fiesta for dinner. It wasn't crowded at all, which we were a bit surprised about, but the waitress told me that most people eat between 4:30 and 6:30 and we got in line around 7. We all had tacos which weren't bad although Alex say to the waitress, "I've had these tacos before at my school cafeteria." I guess the tacos did have the look, feel, and taste of school tacos. Angel would have been horrified to witness this Mexican Fiesta.There was no music and they didn't even have guacamole.
My mom decided that we should all write in our journals before bed, so we all did that. I read a few more pages of The Mystery of Mount Rushmore to the kids, but they all fell fast asleep. It was a long day.
- comments
Lorna So fun to read your blog. I’m reliving our trips to Mt. Rushmore and Yellowstone. Amy shared thus site.
Meesh I loved Wall Drug as a kid. How did your mom like her 5 cent coffee? (I paid $4 for mine this morning.) Looking forward to more posts once you find some decent WiFi again!!