South Dakota
The best part of travel is discovery and discovery is best
in spontaneity. The next day of our
trip we drove through South Dakota. I
saw a sign for the Badlands, mom and I looked at each other, and we turned the
car off the highway. At the first pullover
we read a sign that said General Custer considered the badlands like entering
hell without the fire.
For us it
was like looking out at a flat-ish grand canyon. When we first entered the park we were up
high, and the weirdly eroded badlands fell away in waves. We ate at a picnic area, enjoyed the views
and continued on, stopping at every pullout.
On the other side of the park we found ourselves in reverse scenery, the
limestone shapes rose above us and we were falling away. It was eerie, and beautiful.
The
Badlands have been home to various Indian tribes as well as homesteaders and
have been used as an air force bombing and gunnery range by our military. The Oglala Sioux performed the Ghost dance in
the badlands, in a hope to drive out the white men and to become impervious to
their bullets. The badlands are rich in
fossils and prairie grass filled with black-footed ferrets. I wish we could have spent several days
there, exploring the beauty and the history of the area.
We lost
some time but the detour was worthwhile.
The rest of South Dakota was like a painting, with the colors slowly
fading away off in the distance. As we
drove the hills were replaced with flat fields of wheat, milo and corn. At times huge fields of sunflowers, all in
bloom, blanketed both sides of the highway.
The flowers on the left turned their sunny faces towards us, those on
the right looked away.
We stopped
in Mitchell, SD to see the famous Corn Palace, basically the local events
building covered with murals formed from corn and other grains. While standing around on the main street of
town, eyeing the corn murals, we saw some of the same people from the pullouts
in the badlands.
When we
checked into our hotel, I asked the receptionist what she though of the corn
palace and all the people travelling from all over to see it. She wrinkled her nose, and shook her head. “It’s
crazy. That’s just the gym where we
played basketball.”
South
Dakota is a beautiful state, and after driving through it all day I dreamed of
planting sunflowers and baking bread full of rich grains.
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