Black Hills to Tea (that's Tea, SD)
Custer was a great place to meet dogs. Last night I saw a lady alone with a yellow lab puppy in her campsite crocheting (don't know how she taught that dog to crochet! Truthfully, the misplaced modifier gives a more interesting picture than the real thing). I mentioned to her as I walked by that I'd have to bring my knitting over. I have gotten several dishrags finished by knitting in "down time" over the course of this trip. We started talking & I found out the dog's name was Less, short for "Useless dog." When her husband was about to be deployed to Iraq six months earlier, people started trying to give her a dog. Her response was always, "What do I need with a useless dog?" When friends were breeding lab puppies, she reconsidered and inquired about buying a puppy. The friends insisted on blessing her with a puppy gratis. Rather than face the summer home alone (she is a school teacher), she was traveling and writing her adventures in a book a la Hemingway's Travels with Charlie. She is calling her book Travels with Less, and I am sure that it will be interesting for her husband and grown children to read. Puppies bring lots of friends your way, especially children. Less had plenty of "kid experience" having spent his first months in her classroom last spring. His job had been to sleep and wake up in time to remind her to call recess.
Eric: We left our campground and drove through the park and headed toward Badlands National Park. Badlands, while beautiful and unusual, are quite desolate and on a hot day, seemed extra dry. The Indians had been offered the land, but they had turned it down saying it was "bad" and not good for anything. Wish they would offer it to me. It reminded me very much of the Painted Desert in Arizona, except the hills seemed more rugged and not as warn down as the Painted Desert. Though the erosion was extensive, the ridges left are were very sharp. We stopped briefly at the Badlands National Park visitor's center, got the National Park Passport book stamped and moved on.
Margaret: When it began to get dark, we still had 175 miles to go to get to our reserved campsite. We decided to stop sooner than planned and pulled off at the next exit, Tea, SD. This meant that the next day's drive to St. Louis would be a lot longer. But because nothing particularly scenic was on that drive, we were hoping this would work out okay. The campsite in Tea was called the Red Barn Campground and had from all appearances been a farm redone into a campground. There were corn fields all around. All storage buildings were farm style. Even the bath house looked like a red barn. There was a red bank barn (old) beside that.
The kids had a few minutes to play on the play on the play equipment, and we were able to cook dinner avoiding another restaurant meal. Figured that about broke even in cost, and I was a lot less cranky than if we had pushed on for 175 more miles.
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