Happy 4th of July! (and 5th and 6th)

(We had no phone service Wednesday evening and almost no WiFi. Thursday in Sioux Falls and Friday in Rochester MN it was too hot to do any blogging.)

On the 4th of July, hotter than a firecracker, we drove through the Badlands. They are well named, as you can see:









One brochure talked about "vibrant colors", but I don't think so. Remember ROY-G-BIV from our talks about rainbows? The spectrum here is more like RTY-T-TTT: a washed-out red, a tan, a washed-out yellow, and four more shades of tan.

The sculptured shapes are interesting. It looks like a pile of sugar that would melt in the rain. The history of the landscape is interesting and a lot of early mammal fossils have been found here.

I did find one vibrant green rock and thought I'd sit down for a rest:





Whoa!!!!




Leaving the Badlands National Park, we stopped at a museum commemorating Wounded Knee. It was very well done, very sad, and made the new Americans look pretty bad with the way they treated the old Americans:




On the other hand, Poppa is reading "Last of the Breed" by Louis L'Amour, in which a modern Sioux Indian is asked if he hates the white Americans. He replies "Why should I? My people came west from the Minnesota-Wisconsin border, and we conquered or overrode all that got in our path. We moved into the Dakotas, into Montana and Wyoming and Nebraska. The Kiowa had come down from the Black Hills, driving out those who were there before them. Then we drove them out."

So I guess lots of people have been mean to lots of other people. That's sad.

It's interesting to learn about this when we have just been in Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, the Black Hills, and tomorrow will cross the Minnesota-Wisconsin border - the places this happened.

But I digress. The Wounded Knee museum is in Wall, South Dakota, population 818. Wall is known for "Wall Drug", a drug store purchased by Mr. & Mrs. Hustead in 1931. They needed a gimmick to get people to stop here, so they advertised free ice water, which was nice in 1931 when people didn't have air conditioning in their cars. They kept inventing gimmicks, and Wall Drug became famous. Now Wall has a block-long street with a dozen souvenir stores, several of them always advertising "going-out-of-business" sales.

Do you remember those cute little Miata sports cars that I saw in Moab back on May 6, "Moab to Virgin"? Well, Nana's cousin Mary Ellen and her husband Tom met us in Wall. They had driven their Miata from Indianapolis to California for their son's wedding and were driving back to Indianapolis when we met them in Wall. They had just driven through the Badlands on a gravel road with the top down!










Notice the license plate. We all had a nice lunch and did some souvenir shopping. Tom bought a nice jackalope ornament for their Christmas tree. I even got a ride in a covered wagon with Poppa chasing me:






We didn't get a picture of Tom, but Mary Ellen said she has a nice picture of him wearing a cowboy hat. I'll post it as soon as Mary Ellen sends it to Nana.

They left for Indianapolis and we headed back to our campground. On the way we stopped at a restored homestead from the early 1900s. This was similar to what Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote about in "Little House on the Prairie". It was a pretty hard way to make a living:





















On Thursday we drove to Sioux Falls. Poppa had seen a picture of a suspension bridge in a travel brochure. It looked really neat, so we drove country roads 30 miles out of our way to see it. Here it is (Nana isn't really smiling, she's gritting her teeth):





Friday morning, before we left Sioux Falls, we went to see the falls, which looked really big and beautiful in a travel brochure:





I think there's a lesson to be learned here about travel brochures.

Poppa asked me to post this winescape for Rich and Dave:




Posted from Nana's iPad