Category: Travel
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Day 313 – The Corn Palace (Mitchell, SD)
The Corn Palace The Corn Palace is a concert hall / sports center in Mitchell, SD, that is decorated with elaborate murals constructed from different colors of dried corn. Each year a new theme is chosen and murals designed to match the them. This year the theme was “homegrown” with murals featuring people and…
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Day 311 – The Badlands
For over 11,000 years the badlands region of South Dakota has been inhabited by native people. The soft sedimentary layers of soil once under a body of water are easily eroded, currently at the rate of 1 inch per year, which leads to deep winding valleys and buttes striped with color. Originally authorized in…
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Day 310 – Wall Drug and Dinosaur Park
There’s not much to see on the drive across South Dakota. Fortunately enterprising folks have been constructing roadside kitsch since the newly created National Parks drew visitors from all over after the turn of the century. Today there’s a lot less of them and the remaining sites are often in disrepair, but still some…
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Day 304 to 309 – Driving through the Black Hills: Devil’s Tower, Deadwood, Mount Rushmore
We drove into the Black Hills setting off from Little Big Horn. An island of Ponderosa pine covered granite mountains and hills rising up out of a sea of flat farmland on all sides. The granite was pushed up as part of the same geological events that created the Rocky Mountains and the area…
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Day 301 – St. Xavier, Montana – “My lands are where my dead lie buried.”
I’m sitting in a small hunting cabin in St. Xavier, Montana in the middle of the Crow reservation, population: 83. We dipped down off of I90 at Billings across a dry landscape and flat farmlands. We hadn’t given it much thought. An AirBnB in a convenient location with room to park the Rialta and…
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Day 295 – Grand Teton National Park
[Mile 1,820 to 2,200 ] Directly below Yellowstone National Park sits Grand Teton National Park. The two parks nearly touch but are separated by a narrow stretch called the John D. Rockefeller Jr. Memorial Parkway. Exiting the south entrance there’s not even an entry gate into Teton. Only the familiar park sign. The…
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Day 292 – Yellowstone National Park
[Mile 1,348 to 1,820] It’s hard to visit a place so majestic as Yellowstone without reflecting on the boundless cruelty and hubris imported to this country. In 1800 there were over 60 million bison that once roamed from Alaska to the Gulf of Mexico and from New York the Pacific Ocean. By 1840,…
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Day 288 to 291 – Driving from Glacier to Yellowstone
[Mile 980 to 1,348] Canola fields in Montana. As we set out across Montana the canola fields were spectacularly in bloom. The brightest 50’s kitchen yellow tucked under a fluffy cloud sky with mountains all around in the distance. That night we stayed in a hotel in Missoula to do some laundry and…
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Day 285 – Glacier National Park
[Mile 630 to 980] When I was young I took a road trip around the country with a friend, living in his Honda Prelude, we’d open our paper atlas each day, look for a place that sounded cool, then we’d drive there, all summer. We drove from New Orleans to Canada, all the…
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Day 283 – Driving from Spokane to Glacier National Park
[Mile 335 to 630] We started the day in Spokane from our campground. I made a quick detour to grab a photo of the giant milk-jug shaped building in town then we drove all the way through Idaho (stopping briefly in Wallace) to Montana and to our new campground in Cabin City Forest…