Custer State Park, the Black Hills, SD

We drove through the Black Hills National Forest to get to Custer State park. We were a little weary about getting a campsite in Custer because we had heard that they had booked a lot through the summer already. We stopped in the park office and talked to a really nice ranger who let us know where to try and get a campsite. It was right near the lake, and we were lucky in getting a spot, because the spot we got was beautiful, right near the creek, right by the lake, it was awesome. We got there in the afternoon so we decided to set up shop, have a bite to eat, and drive through the park and check out Mt Rushmore. The drive through the park and through the Black Hills was beautiful, not too windy but there were some spots where you would have to go through a tunnel only one car at a time. It was pretty fun because you got to honk a bunch while driving through. One of the tunnels you drove through the tunnel framed Mt Rushmore perfectly. It was about dusk when we arrived at Mt Rushmore, we knew that we were coming back the next night to see the light show so we just walked around a little bit and took some pictures. When we drove back to our campsite we got stopped on the road by some bison. This was our first encounter with the buffalo and let me tell you there are bigger than you think! They were crossing the road, just meandering across slowly. We were able to get some good photos of them because they were so close. Later after our encounter we talked with a ranger who said that the bison have come pretty accustomed to cars but not really motorcycles, which we found out the next day. The next day when we were driving through the park we encountered some more bison and a motorcycle did not want to wait for the buffalo to cross and when it revved its engine the buffalo sort of charged it. Pretty amazing animals.
We spent the second day in Custer at the lake, the water was cold but Joe and I still got in. We took a trail that looked like it went all the way around the lake, but halfway through we kind of had to make our own trail to get across the lake and back onto the real trail. It was a beautiful day of sunshine and a nice nature walk around the lake. After the day at the lake we BBQ’d early to be able to make it to the light show at Mt Rushmore. When we went back to Mt Rushmore we took the trail that got you as close as you possibly could get to the mountain with the famous carvings on it. Along the trail there were stops to read about each president and sort of why they were chosen to be part of the memorial. After we walked the trail and got some really great shots (or at least we think that they are good) of the four presidents on the mountain of granite, we headed down to the amphitheater to get seats to catch the light show. Before they lit up the mountain a ranger gave some history about the project, the presidents, and also some trivia questions about quotes of the presidents. We learned later after this evening that Mt Rushmore was never actually finished. When the government took over the project they stopped putting money into the project and the sculptures are incomplete. They were originally supposed to be full busts of all four presidents. If you look close enough you can see the top of George Washington’s jacket, but that is it. When you see the scale model of what it was supposed to look like it makes you a little sad that it was never finished. After the show we drove back to our campsite and got ready to leave the next day to see the Crazy Horse Memorial and hopefully get a good steak dinner in Hill City.

The "Bad Lands", the badlands national park

Joe and I were very lucky to learn so much Native American history while traveling. It became really strong while we were in South Dakota. As we drove into the Badlands the scenery was really indescribable. You could see these crazy mountain formations that looked like they were made out of many layers of sand, and they went of for miles. An almost never ending vast of these mountains, along with lots of prairie land. We had heard that the Lakota Sioux Indians had named this land “ the Bad Lands” and some French travelers had said “ they were hard lands to cross.” Even the famous artist Frank Lloyd Wright described them as “ an endless supernatural world…” I would have to say when Joe and I were driving through them I got a really weird spiritual feeling by looking across this vast land. It really showed when we got back from driving around the park and I had taken over 200 pictures and it was really hard to tell a lot of them apart but I could not stop taking photos.
Our stay at Badlands National Park was quite interesting. The second day we were there we drove out to the town of Wall. Where after all those signs on the highway, we finally checked out Wall Drug. As the story goes this woman and her husband own this drug store in Wall during the Great Depression. One day the woman was laying down in the hot afternoon trying to take a nap but the buzz of all the traffic on the highway was bugging her. This is when the light bulb came on, she thought if she offered all these drivers free ice water they would come (reminded me of Field of Dreams, “if you build it, they will come”). Even as her husband was putting up the first sign “Free Ice Water, Wall Drug” they had to hire more help, they were getting tons of traffic. The husband figured the more signs he put up the more people would come, he even had a friend put up signs in Europe stating how far to Wall Drug during WWII. Today there are signs in all kinds of illogical places stating the distance to Wall Drug, but what does make sense is the amount of business they do now. The actual Wall Drug that is there now is about a block long, with many different shops in one. They still have free ice water… among ice cream, fudge, candy, and souvenirs. Joe and I took some hilarious photos among the figurines they have around. They even had a huge Jackelope that you could get on top of! (Joe riding a jackelope, awesome!) We also got our free Wall Drug sign, wherever we end up we can write the mileage to Wall Drug and send them a photo… seriously crazy stuff!
When we got back to our campsite at Badlands NP we met some interesting people. There was a woman who was driving one of those HUGE RV’s that look like a coach bus and trailing a huge SUV, was doing all this by herself! She was a character, said her and her husband were “free spirits” and she had been in Florida or Illinois (she talked really fast) and was bored and decided to go meet her husband who was doing some work with a Native American tribe near Yellowstone… We had heard this weird scream in the middle of the night and it turns out that it was this woman, one of her dogs had bit her in the middle of the night… a dog she had had for 6 years, crazy! Joe ended up helping her get her SUV back onto the trailer she was towing with the HUGE RV, if Joe hadn’t offered I do not know how she was going to do it on her own. I gave her many kudos for doing what she was doing on her own, I mean I had been traveling with Joe for 6 weeks by then and it was still pretty hard!
We also met this guy who had packed up all his stuff (well not all of it…) and packed it onto his motorbike (not a large motorcycle, you will have to ask Joe what it was) and left San Francisco to drive cross country and was planning on ending up in Arizona for grad school. He had some good insight since he had basically just driven the route that we were planning on heading into. What was really interesting about him was not that he was traveling by himself, but that he had some radio production background (Aengus if you are ready this sorry if I get some of my facts wrong!) and in all the places he had stopped, he would ask some people these 2 questions and then record their answers. I think that he is going to make a video or book about it. The two questions (if I can remember correctly) were “what are you most afraid of right now?” and the other was “what are most excited about in your life?” He said that he got some really interesting answers, the only one I can remember is this guy said that he was most afraid of the world ending due to the Aztec calendar… hahaha I am still laughing.
Even the park rangers at the Badlands were interesting. When Joe and I had got back from Wall Drug, Joe had asked me to get out of the truck to put the tail gate down to be able to hook back up to the trailer. Well when I was about to step out of the truck I noticed a huge black thing on the ground (the ground was basically made up of white rock) and what was it… a freaking spider! Well I got out and scaled the truck (staying as close to the truck as I possibly could) and then I ran into the trailer. Joe got out wondering what the heck was wrong with me and I pointed out the spider. I sat there and watched it scurry across the road. Joe had said that he saw one of the same spiders earlier when we were driving through the park. So he stopped and asked a ranger what kind of spider it was. She told us that it was a wolf spider and she proceeds to go into this story about how her friend got bit by one and it turned into a huge crater in the skin and had to go see a doctor… but they are mostly harmless… yea freaking right lady! Let’s just say I was once again super freaked out!
The Badlands were beautiful and the experience interesting time to go check out the Black Hills and Custer State Park.

The Corn Palace, art made out of corn, amazing!

Along our trip we have been getting a lot of our ideas about what to check out from this book that Joe found called 1000 Places to See Before You Die, USA & Canada. As we drove into South Dakota our first stop was a town called Mitchell. Mitchell is famous for their Corn Palace. (we found out about the Corn Palace from the “1000 Places” book) The first Corn Palace was made in 1892, they decided to build it for the Corn Belt Exposition, which was where the town showcased their most important resource, corn. When you first see the building it is kind of stunning in that weird art sort of way. When you get closer you realize that all the art on the walls and the columns are made out of corn. They grow over 180,000 acres of corn just to decorate the palace, using many different colors and species of corn. The Corn Palace has a different look and theme each year. When they first started local artists would just make geometric patterns and then they began making murals out of the corn. This year’s theme was “destinations”, it was incredible, they had Mt Rushmore, Golden Gate Bridge of San Francisco, Washington DC, Crazy Horse Memorial, the St Louis Arch, and the Statue of Liberty. The artist makes a “corn by number” map for the volunteers who actually attach the corn onto the building. It takes them almost 3 months to remove the previous year’s corn and put up the new “palace”. We actually watched some of the volunteers ( local high school kids) cutting and attaching the corn to the building. They still have an exposition every year after they have finished the palace, bands come and perform, it is a huge party!
We were lucky enough to get some real good advice about visiting South Dakota from a gentlemen that worked the info desk at the Corn Palace. He gave us a map where he highlighted different spots along the highway where we should stop as we were heading to Badlands National Park, and then onto Custer State Park and the memorials. He suggested we stop at a view point halfway between Mitchell and the Badlands, right before you cross the Missouri river, where you had an amazing view and could take some cool photos, also if you went into the info center you could learn some about Louis & Clarke’s travels,. We stopped and took some photos, the Missouri river was huge in this part. We headed on further down the highway, changed time zones, and then finally arrived at the Badlands National Park. I forgot to mention but as soon as we got on the highway in South Dakota we kept seeing these signs for Wall Drug. They were seriously almost every quarter mile, Joe and I were both like what the heck is wall drug and where the heck is it? Because we drove a couple hundred miles and did not run into it. Joe also thought he had heard of it before so I checked in the “1000 places” book and low and behold it was in there. We went and checked it out while staying in Badlands… I get to that in a moment.

Omaha, Nebraska: the Zoo and a baseball game

We left Kansas heading for Nebraska and funny enough we had to drive through Iowa to get to Omaha. We spent one night in Sioux City, Iowa. (another crazy ass storm night to try and sleep through) My dad was telling me that Iowa is where my grandfather Floyd was originally from. When we were driving through it totally made sense, everything was named Floyd, Floyd river, Floyd this, Floyd that. It was really funny.
Once we got to Omaha we went and checked out their zoo. We read that Omaha's Henry Doorly Zoo was a strong rival to the San Diego Zoo, so we were pretty excited to check it out. My cousin Alicia had just recently moved back to San Diego from Nebraska so I picked her brain about what to check out (she is definitely glad to be back in California... I cannot imagine why). When we reached the street that led to the zoo we realized that it was literally right across the street from the stadium that holds the men's college world series. Funny enough it had just started that same week that we were there. We were already thinking about maybe trying to catch a game after we checked out the zoo.
The zoo was pretty amazing (I mean I cannot even remember the last time I went to a zoo). We saw all sorts of your normal zoo animals, zebras, elephants, rhinos, monkeys, lions, and tigers, and bears oh my! I have to say seeing the Rhinos was pretty awesome, they are so big and just really interesting to me. We got to see some giraffes and a cheetah pretty close up! When we went through the tiger, lion, and bear section of the park it seemed to be nap time, because literally everyone of the animals was sleeping. They were all so beautiful. The zoo also had this new insect exhibit where you got to walk through a dome full of butterflies. It was crazy that we got to walk through with them all flying around. Well then we went through the other section of the insect exhibit and this was full of spiders, and other bugs. As most of you know, I am very very afraid of spiders so I was a little apprehensive to walk through this part. But it was okay at first because the bugs were in their little glass houses and could not jump out and get me. But as we were walking I saw this sign that said "check out our friends hanging from their natural webs above you, but don't worry they do not leave their webs". I read this and was like "WTF?!?!?!?" I look up and this gentlemen next to me says "oh look at that one right above your head". At this moment I was starting to have a panic attack, so I booked it out of there and waited for Joe on the other side of the door. Seriously not my thing! I could not believe that they would just let these spiders kick it out in the open!!! After my mini panic attack we went and checked out their mini aquarium within the zoo. It was really cool, they had sharks, turtles, and even some penguins! Once we had walked all around the park and had something to eat, we went and saw an imax movie they had playing. It was "Under the Sea" and was narrated by Jim Carrey, it was awesome, it was in 3D!
After the zoo we changed out clothes and bought some baseball tickets. We got to see Virginia vs. Arkansas. We were so lucky it was a very eventful game. We had seats right behind 1st base, anyone who as ever been to a baseball game, no balls are ever usually hit behind first base, but it happened that night, more than once! The game went 12 innings! It was very exciting, we were really happy we took the chance to catch it. After the game we decided to get some hours on the road out of the way and so we headed into South Dakota!

Wichita Art Musuem, KS

Back when Joe and I were in Texas and we had figured out that we were pretty much halfway through our money and decided to start heading north instead of more east, we had decided that we were going to get through the Great Plains states pretty quick. So we looked at our 1000 Places to See Before you Die book and would pick out one or two places to check out and move on, according to our driving path. So Kansas basically had one thing really to offer us, other than their crazy storms, and that was their Wichita Art Museum. So Joe and I went and checked it out... it only cost us $4 a piece, what a steal.
They had this amazing blown glass art that was in the floor, you could take your shoes off and walk on the glass and see all the blown glass in the floor. They had a traveling pottery exhibit, which Joe loved since he is really into pottery. I was very sneaky and took some good photos of some of the art! (I was only supposed to be allowed to take pictures of the art that the museum owned, not any of the traveling exhibits) It was a fairly small museum, but definitely worth checking out on our way through Kansas.
Other than the museum, we did not see much in Kansas, just what we saw from the road. Not our kind of scenery...
Next we were headed to Nebraska!

Last stop in Oklahoma: Marland Estate Mansion

After Oklahoma City which headed over to Tulsa because we had read that they had some pretty awesome art museums. We were lucky enough to catch the last Laker's game (and they won the championship, of course!) and woke up the next morning to head to the museums. Well turns out that these museums (and most other art museums) are closed on Mondays! We didn't really want to stay another night so we headed on out of Oklahoma for Kansas. Right before we crossed state lines we stopped in Ponca,OK. We wanted to check out this mansion previously owned by an oil mogul (supposedly the mansion was a hearst castle of the great plains...not really).
We took the self guided tour and checked out all the rooms. There was some pretty interesting stuff, especially the kitchen. They had one of the first mechanical dishwashers (think of the ones you see in restaurants these days but just a prehistoric version). All of the rooms were really well preserved, one of the bathrooms (I think it was the son's) had one of those exercise machines from back in the day where you put what looks like a seat belt strap around your booty and it is supposed to rub off the fat... if only that really worked! Another one of the bathrooms had one of the first saunas ever made, to me it looked more like a tanning booth, had tons of light bulbs in it. There was some very interesting art all around the mansion. Once we were all done checking it out we headed north to Wichita, Kansas. And what was there waiting for us... oh that's right another freaking storm!
I must say that I am pretty lucky to have Joe, because I am sure no one else would put up with my "freaking out" about storms. It was the lighting or quarter size hail so much as it was the wind and in a trailer the wind makes you feel like at any moment you will be taken up into the air and that's it, "your not in Kansas anymore"!
I did get some really cool photos of the one of the storms that we were in.

Oklahoma: National Cowboy & Western Museum, Oklahoma City Memorial & Museum

From Austin we decided to go to Oklahoma City, OK, it was about a % hour drive. We were about 40 miles from Oklahoma City when we got our first TORNADO warning. We were lucky enough to be listening to the local radio (by this part of the trip we were pretty tired of the ipod) when the weather center broke in through with the warning. We had been watching the lightning storm while we were driving but hadn’t hit any rain yet and to be honest hadn’t even thought about tornados. Well the man on the radio starts naming off the counties the warnings are in and which way the storm is heading, so I scrabble to find the county names on the map and figure out where the heck the storm is compared to where we were headed. Just as I am finding the counties on the map he saws the name of the highway we are on the the mile marker number, which was oh only 10 miles north of us and we were going to be driving right through it. Luckily the storm was heading southeast and we were heading northwest, so we missed it. But I can tell you this I had never been so scared of weather in my life up until this point (it would get worse later…) We made it safely through the night and headed to an RV park just north of Oklahoma City to hook up and get cleaned up. The next day we hit up to really great museums in OK City. The first one was the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. This museum was awesome! We got to enjoy some amazing local art and contemporary art from over the years. There were these five huge murals in one of their exhibit halls. You would not believe their size, I had Joe stand in front of one while I took a picture so you could get a sense of their grandeur. There were also some amazing statues , one named “The End of the Trail” was just breathtaking. It was of a Native American Indian warrior sitting on his horse in kind of a bent over position. It was beautiful, so critics thought it put Native Americans in a bad light because you could say that the warrior looks like he is defeated, but from my perspective it was moving and I did not get a sense of defeat. What was amazing was the story of how the statue came together and how it ended up in the museum. When Joe first saw the statue in a photograph in one of our travel books he said that it looked familiar and when we got to read the story of how the statue came to be it made sense why he recognized it. The statue was actually on display in Visalia, CA (which is the town right next to where Joe grew up) for many years. We went through a few painting and sculpture galleries and then got to the history section of the museum. Here we learned about Cowboys and Indians. They had an entire section devoted to Western Films and also a section devoted to the Rodeo. I did not think that I was going to enjoy the museum as much as Joe would, but I really did. We were very lucky to be able to take as many photos as we did.
After the National Cowboy museum we went to the Oklahoma City Memorial and Museum, which was dedicated after the Oklahoma City Bombing. The experience put you through all the emotions associated with death. It was weird to feel all these things and know no one who was actually killed or hurt by the bombing. The memorial was very moving, even just by it’s size. The memorial covered not only the area where the federal building once stood, but a parking lot that was across the street as well. We saw just a glimpse of the memorial as we headed into the building where the museum was held. (since I am so behind on these blogs I cannot remember which building it was that the museum was in, but it was basically two buildings away from the federal building, on the same side the bomb went off) Let me give you a little background on the bombing, in case you do not know or do not remember what happened. (this might sound a little cheesy, but bare with me) It started like any other day on April 19th,1995, people got ready for work, dropped their kids off at school and daycare, and headed into the office to start their work day. The Federal building housed many different government agencies, from the CIA, FBI, to social services, and housing development. They even had a children’s daycare for the children of the people who worked there. At 9:02 am the bomb went off, after investigations, they figured out that a Ryder moving truck was parked directly in front of the building and this was what housed the bomb. They bomb blew off about 1/3 of the building, and they shocks were felt up to 2 miles away. Many people were instantly killed, but most were not. After they came to and began to figure out what had just happened to them, they got their bearings together and tried to figure out what to do next. Some were able to escape from the back side of the building, some were stranded on the 6th & 7th floors. In the hours that came after the bombing, the humanity that was shown was astonishing. All emergency agencies (EMS, Fire, Police, Red Cross, etc) came as soon as they heard. The first action was to rescue all the people they could, an hour and a half after the bomb went off there was a bomb scare and all people had to evacuate. Once they were allowed back in the rescuing continued. Local nurses and doctors came in by the hundreds to help, they set up mini clinics to asses injuries and send the worst hurt people straight to the hospitals. Emergency agencies from other states came in to help, the story of the humanity and the community coming together put hope back in your heart that people could learn to live together in this world. The museum took you through the timeline of what I just described to you. They actually have the bombing on audio tape. In a building right next to the federal building they were having a local hearing about water rights and they taped the hearing which in turn got the bombing on tape. They sat you in a room and you got to listen to it go off, shocks you right to the core. After you listen to the bombing you go through a series of rooms that have the events played out in order. They have some of the rubble, personal items from the children and workers they found on display. The timeline and the stories were very moving, to read about how people acted and reacted restored a sense of community in you. It brought one sad thought to mind, why does an incredible tragedy have to occur for people to come together with such force?
After the timeline it goes into the investigation. They actually had pieces of the Ryder truck that they found on display, with maps of where they found them. They found the axle of the truck, 3 blocks away! Gives you a little perspective of the destruction the bomb caused. Investigators were very lucky when it came to catching Timothy McVeigh, he had been pulled over by local police only 2 hours away from OK City. He was arrested for illegal gun possession and taken to the local jail. Once investigators had followed the leads and gotten to Timothy McVeigh all they had to do was go get him from the local police…
The entire story and investigation was very thought provoking, it was good we went through the museum and then went out and walked around the memorial, you got to then collect your thoughts and come back to the reality of your day, not April 19th 1995.
The memorial as I said before was very moving just in it’s size. They took the lot where the federal building was and the adjacent parking lot and dedicated it all to this memorial. On both ends of the memorial stood these huge square arched entry ways, they had 9:01, 9:02, and 9:03 written on them. These stand for the time when OK City was innocent and unknowing (9:01), the time the bomb went off (9:02), and the time that they would be changed forever (9:03). Between the two entry ways was a large long reflecting pool and then on one side was a grassy area with empty chairs. The chairs stood for all those that were lost in the bombing. On the opposite side of the reflecting pool was a huge tree, the Survivor tree. The story about this tree is awesome. It was in the parking lot across the street from the federal building, not only did it survive the blast, but only had a few branches burned. It is in the exact place it was that day. After the bombing they nursed it back to good health and harvested some of the seedlings, after 9/11 one of the seedlings was given to the city of New York. The entire experience was so moving, Joe and I were very quiet for the rest of the day.
From here we headed to Tulsa, OK, and into another storm.

Texas: Part 7, Austin TX

We headed further south to Austin, TX. Austin is Texas’ state capital. We stayed at a Walmart just outside of town the night before we headed into the city. This night was one of the worst storms we had encountered so far. There was the craziest lightning, not mention thunder, and quarter size hail. We are not kidding you folks, QUARTER size hail! Let’s just say it was an adventure and we should have known that was not going to be the worst we were going to see. Joe and I had noticed that whole week we were driving through Texas we saw a lot of motorcycles, and not just one guys rolling down the highway, there we convoys of 4-5 bikes. Well it turns out that it there was a motorcycle rally in Austin that weekend we were there. So as we were walking through downtown Austin we saw a ton of bikes, most were your typical Harley or Indian, but then some were way out there or super tricked out. There were also a lot of bars, pubs, and live music venues. There were a few that had some pretty awesome names, we took some pictures of there décor. We walked from the famous 6th street to the capital, checking out some of the architecture along the way. As we got close to the capital we noticed the street right in front of the capital was blocked off. There were a bunch of workers setting up for a “evil kenevil” type stunt. A guy on a bike was going to jump two Budweiser semi trucks in a row! We didn’t have time to stay for the night to catch the show but I am sure it would have been pretty awesome. We caught a few good photos of the capital and then headed back to the truck and trailer, did I mentioned that Joe parked it downtown?!? He parallel parked it into two spots, we just put quarters in both meters! We had decided that we were about half way through our trip funds and that we were not going to be able to go any further east, so it was time to start heading north… we didn’t know at the time that we were going to be heading into the eye of the storm in almost every state we hit north of Texas…

Texas: Part 6, Dr Pepper Musuem, Waco TX

After we left John & Tiff’s we headed south to Waco, TX. We decided to stop there because they had a Dr Pepper Museum and my Mom loves Dr Pepper! The museum was actually in the building that Dr Pepper was originally made in. It started out as a pharmacy/ soda shop. This guy went to work in the shop and began mixing different syrup flavors to get new sodas. One day he mixed 23 flavors into one soda, tons of people tried it and from that day on it was a major hit! That was the day Dr Pepper was conceived, all those 23 flavors still make up Dr Pepper today. As we walked through the museum we saw how Dr Pepper was bottled, all the different bottles they went through the years, then the different cans, and then the different plastic bottles. The company went through a few different logos and eventually dropped the period after Dr. The museum went further into their slogans and marketing through out the years. Then at the end they had a neat gift shop and soda fountain. Joe and I shared an original Dr Pepper float, made from the syrup, soda water, and ice cream, and man was it sweet!!! It was a true homage to my Mom’s favorite drink!