South Dakota, Part I

Where to start with stories on our trip to South Dakota??? One of the primary reasons I do this blog is for history--as the girls get older and older, they have a record of what we did.

Saturday we headed out. Had lots of detours to make us cranky. Saw lots of flooding--crazy stuff. Stopped in Sioux Falls to visit Falls Park. I could have stayed here all day!

The park was gorgeous! We headed across South Dakota at that point, and it was a looooonnggg drive. Nothing to see across South Dakota. We didn't have reservations, so I started looking for places to stay. I had an interesting encounter at a hotel--the creepy man running it still lived there with his mom, and I felt very dirty after visiting the lobby. I told Bobby, "no way are we staying here!" when I got back in the car. We were trying to find a place reasonably priced with a pool. Either the hotel was outrageously priced, or the pool was closing in 10 minutes. Finally found a place where the pool was open until 8:30, so we started racing to get there.

Then we entered the Badlands National Forest and saw this:

The girls start begging: Can we get out and climb??? I said, that's fine, but the pool will close. They said okay, so we parked and started walking, climbing, jumping for over an hour until it was too dark to see anything.

Then we headed off to the land of mosquito's...