We have been gone such a short time and already we don’t know what day it is. I am writing this on Day 3 very early in the morning as we were so tired last night it was to bed early and let the blog wait until early this morning. We are awakening this morning in the very middle of the South Dakota Badlands. What a sight! But wait, before we tell you about this, let us share how we got here.
Day 2 dawned with the threats of rainy weather, but we packed the car in a hurry and were off through west central Iowa. What a beautiful journey. We saw field after field of corn and beans same as the day before, but today we added sunflowers and sorghum, too, as we motored on through South Dakota. As the terrain became more rolling, we saw an abundance of terracing and lots of grass greenways. 
As we take time out at our many rest stops, we are reminded of elder Beehler son, Jeff’s remark “ the tectonic plates will NOT be moving any time soon and all that lies before us will still be there when we arrive.” We have all traveled the west many times before, always without a GPS, cell phones or our I-Pads. We wonder how we ever made it. All the information at our immediate fingertips sometimes is overwhelming…….but we never stop the quest for just a little bit more information.
At Souix City, IA, we have our first glimpse of the great Missouri River. We are still trying to envision the Louis and Clark trek over 200 years ago and we can’t imagine it in any form. We see the Floyd Memorial to the only life lost on the trip of thousands of miles. We have our copies of Undaunted Courage and we read a few chapters each day. In the middle of South Dakota, we actually cross the wide Missouri.
As we enter the Badlands area nearing the end of our day, we are reminded of the quote from Frank Lloyd Wright,” I’ve been about the world a lot and pretty much over our own country, but I was totally unprepared for that revelation called the Dakota Bad lands……What I saw gave me an indescribable sense of mysterious elsewhere----a distant architecture, an endless super-natural world more spiritual than earth but created out of it.”
It was indeed totally awesome and hard to describe.
A first impression as we drove into the park was it looked like a giant Disney theme park with a lot of fake rocks….only these were definitely not fake. We didn’t take time at the Visitor Center to watch the movie about the formation of the rocks, but maybe we should have as we have a lot of questions.
We check in at the Circle View Ranch and are in for another treat as we are welcomed as family. More awesome views, almost more than the mind can absorb. We share the ranch tonight with a host of bicyclists from Germany. We make a trip through the Badlands Park as the sun sets and are treated to prong horn antelope, sheep, and deer.
