TheBanyanTree: On the Road

[Margaret R. Kramer]

Labor Day weekend and the week following seemed to be a good time for a road
trip.  Sure, there would be some families around on the weekend, but after
Labor Day, most of the kiddies would be back in school and their parents
back at work, and the road would be ours.  And it was, except for all the
seniors in their 2000 foot long motor homes with their Cadillacs being towed
behind.

And the Harleys . . . there were Harleys everywhere.  I think every
Harley-Davidson owner was out on the road celebrating the 100th anniversary
of the motorcycle.  And it seemed most of those Harley owners were my age or
older, trying to look sexy in black leather complimented with big bellies
and graying hair.

We hit the road on Saturday morning, August 30.  Ray wanted to do a real
road trip, with no set itinerary, and just drive in the direction the car is
pointing.  I’m a compulsive planner (that’s why I like cruises, because
everything is planned and I just follow along), so I need to know where we
were going and what was there to do on the way.  I need to know the route.
I need hotel reservations.  I need a compass.

We decided we would go to the Black Hills in South Dakota.  I made hotel
reservations for the first two nights, just to cover our butts on Labor Day
weekend.  I really didn’t want to sleep in our tiny VW Golf.   After those
first two nights, we were free to go where we wanted.

I also contacted my auto club and they sent great maps with route
suggestions and things to see along the way.  That’s perfect for a planner
like me.

The car was pointing south, heading out of the Twin Cities metro, and we
rode along, through the sprawling southern suburbs, and finally into the
southern Minnesota farmland.

The land is flat and dotted with cornfields.  The most interesting things we
saw on this very familiar route (I have relatives in Iowa and my son went to
college in Iowa – so I-90 offers nothing new to me) were the HUGE windmills
that actually look like big fans along the interstate.  They’re used to
generate electricity.

We crossed the border into South Dakota.  This state really advertises
itself.  Any attraction that it has is highlighted with a billboard along
the highway.  Wall Drug is the best one – Wall Drug advertises on a million
signs and they’re funny, too.

We stayed in Sioux Falls the first night.  It’s a middle-sized town along
the Sioux River.  The river was practically a dry bed – they’ve had a
drought, too.  We took a free trolley ride through the town.

The next day we drove across the flat land to Mitchell, SD and the Corn
Palace.  This is a theater that’s decorated every year with corn.  They use
cobs, leaves, and husks to create interesting designs on the theater’s
outside walls.  There was a Corn Palace festival at the time we were there,
so the streets were full of vendors and Harley Davidson riders, and the
seniors trying to squeeze their motor homes into small parking spaces.

As we headed west, something happened to the land.  It was no longer flat
and dotted with beef cattle and grazing horses.  The earth began to show its
inner self with deep crevices and huge ancient rock formations rising up
from nowhere.  Our car was pulled towards the Badlands National Park.  Being
in the park was like being on the moon.  It’s so desolate, so lonely, and so
achingly beautiful, that I took picture after picture.  That place was
incredible.

When we left the park, we saw that Wall Drug was a few miles north and we
drove there.  Wall Drug is a big tourist trap, but that’s OK.  It was fun to
wander around the huge Old West complex, bumping into Harley riders and
seniors waiting for ice cream cones.

We stayed in Rapid City, SD that night.  We headed towards Mount Rushmore
the next morning.  I’m so glad that the sculptor of Mount Rushmore died when
he did in 1941.  He had so many plans for the monument, that it would have
looked gross and overdone if he was allowed to finish it.  It’s perfect the
way it is – understated and eloquent.

We drove the winding roads through one lane tunnels, along high forested
hills, and into prairie valleys in the Black Hills National Forest.  Then we
drove through Custer State Park and saw herds of buffalo (really they’re
supposed to be called bison), long horned sheep, and thousands of prairie
dogs along our route.

We ended up at the Wind Cave National Park.  We walked down 350 steps into
the cave.  The cave’s temperature is around 53 degrees.  The steps were
slippery.  It was dark.  But it was interesting to imagine how the cave was
formed millions of years ago.  The kids in our tour group loved it.

We drove to Deadwood, SD.  Deadwood is an Old West town that’s re-invented
itself into a small gambling mecca.  The town is hugged into the hills.  The
main street is lined with casinos and small restaurants.  There was a cowboy
shooting reenactment.  Bang!  Bang!  Just like on Gunsmoke.  And the streets
were filled with Harley riders and senior citizens looking for a good time.
Sturgis, SD is right down the road from Deadwood, and even though the
Sturgis Harley thing was over with, the Harley riders were still around
celebrating and spending money.

We stayed in a refurbished old hotel with a small room and bathroom.  The
elevator operator had to haul us upstairs and downstairs, and that bothered
me for some reason, and I’m not a cowboy, and I don’t gamble, so I didn’t
feel comfortable in Deadwood.  But we wandered down the street, ate dinner
at a Chinese restaurant, and Ray played a few slots before going to bed.

We drove to the Devil’s Tower in Wyoming as the children in Deadwood were
being picked up and school bused for their first day of school.  The land in
WY changed around every turn and we could see the Big Horn mountains far
away on the horizon.

Devil’s Tower sprouts out in an eerie way from the horizon.  It gave me
shivers when I first spotted it.  It just doesn’t fit in with the rest of
the landscape and that’s what makes it so unique.

We debated about driving to Yellowstone National Park in the western region
of WY, but Ray felt we didn’t have enough time, so we headed north into
Montana.  Our goal was to see the Little Bighorn National Park, the place
where Custer made his last stand.

We spent the night in Hardin, MT, and on a beautiful sunny morning went to
the park.  It’s a sad place, because what happened to the Indians was unfair
and what happened to Custer and his men was unfair, too.  There are markers
where Custer’s men fell, but all the bodies are buried in one mass grave
below a large memorial.  Custer is buried at West Point.  There is a
national cemetery at the park as well.

If we would have thrown a match out of the window, the state of Montana
would have gone up in flames.  It was so dry and so brown.  The temperatures
for most of our trip were in the 90s with no rain and very little humidity.
The sun baked the land every day and the moon cooled it down at night.

We cut through the Indian reservation and got on I-94 and headed towards
North Dakota.  I didn’t have a clue what was in North Dakota, so we stopped
at their information building to get maps and brochures.  We decided to see
the Theodore Roosevelt National Park and drove to Medora, ND.

Medora is owned by a candy factory, but I’m not sure which one, and sits
outside of the park.  The place shuts down after Labor Day, but we found a
nice room at a nice hotel.  There were a couple of restaurants open, so got
our “grub.”

The park was incredible.  Again, it’s the badlands, but in ND and not quite
as eerily sculptured.  We saw a large herd of bison along the road along
with the perennial prairie dogs.  We walked up to the highest point in the
park and gazed with awe at the scenery below us.  We were privileged to get
a glimpse of our earth’s past.

There is a dinosaur museum in Dickinson, ND, and we stopped there to take
pictures for our dinosaur-crazy grandsons.  It’s a great museum with lots of
neat stuff.  They also had a cool rock collection of all kinds of gems and
minerals and even coral samples.  They also had an excellent exhibition
celebrating the 200th anniversary of the Lewis and Clark exploration of the
Louisiana territory.  Yes, we can find interesting things in small towns.

We spent the night in Bismarck, North Dakota’s state capitol, and almost
didn’t find a place to sleep, because of an international pow-wow going on
that weekend.  But we found a room off the last exit going out of town.  It
was my favorite kind of hotel.  It had a coffee maker, a microwave, and a
refrigerator in the room.  Plus, it had a nice pool and whirlpool, and after
being in the sun and driving halfway across North Dakota, it was great to
relax in the churning, hot water.

We had lunch in Fargo, ND the next day, and then drove back into Minnesota.
I don’t know the western part of Minnesota very well, so we stopped at the
Minnesota information building and got some ideas.

We drove north to Mahnomen, MN and spent the night at a HUGE casino/resort
called the Shooting Star.  MN has about 25 casinos, I believe.  We played
bingo there and Ray got to play some slots, too.  Our room was nice.  The
service was good, and the food was good, too.

Our last stop was Lake Itasca State Park and the headwaters of the
Mississippi River.  It was warm, and little kids and babies were in the
small stream, laughing, splashing, and running along the bank.  Now I’ve
seen the beginning of the Mississippi, the middle in St. Louis, and the end
in New Orleans.  And, I see it every day here in Minnesota.  It’s my good
friend.

We got home on Saturday, September 6 after sitting on the freeway in the far
northern suburbs of Minneapolis for a long time, because a pickup truck
wrapped itself around a bridge and were again delayed in St. Paul, because
an elderly woman decided to drive the wrong way on the freeway and slammed
into about five cars.  No one was killed, thank goodness.

The accidents and the crazy aggressive drivers reminded us we were back in
our state and not on the road anymore.

Margaret R. Kramer
margaretkramer at earthlink.net

http://www.polarispublications.com
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Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety.

~William Shakespeare