Happy Trails Week 04 July 15 - 21

Drove 332 Miles

We woke up early, had breakfast, packed up the trailer and were on the road in record time – 1 ½ hours. Well, it’s a record for us. What can I tell you?

We started out driving west on Hwy 2 across the rest of the Upper Peninsula. Then began a long day driving south down Highway 41 on the western side of Lake Michigan, then west on Hwy 21 to I39. We were only on the interstate for a short time, then exited onto Hwy 22 which we took to county road “G” then onto Hwy 23 and into Wisconsin Dells, WI.

As we left the Upper Peninsula we waited until we crossed into WI to fill up the gas tank, hoping that we would find cheaper prices. It’s been $3.49 per gallon every since we got into MI. We found WI to be not much better at $3.39. Oh well. Not much we can do about that.

We had reservations at a KOA Campground in The Dells and had no trouble finding it, nor in setting up the trailer. Other than being next to an active railroad track (we even saw Amtrak Trains), it was a very nice site. The shower felt heavenly after a long day on the road.

After getting all spiffed up, we went into town to explore. Wisconsin Dells is kind of like the Pigeon Forge of WI. We found a nice restaurant on the Riverwalk called…The Riverwalk Restaurant (original huh?) and sat outside at a table overlooking the Wisconsin river. It was a nice relaxing evening.

Drove 49 miles

Today I treated myself to a wonderful pedicure and manicure at La Petite Nail Salon while Tim took the truck over to Baraboo, WI to get the oil changed. When he returned, he parked at the nail salon and we walked into town to look through some of the shops and to have some lunch. We found a neat Bavarian restaurant, the Essen Haus, where they were advertising $2.00 margaritas. Yeah, I know that seems odd – margaritas at a Bavarian restaurant, but hey, you have to take advantage of these bargains when you find them. So we had a few since they were so cheap. Another funny thing about the restaurant was the huge clock tower outside. Rather than playing good old beer drinking songs, it was playing John Phillip Sousa marches. Hilarious! At one point while we were eating it even played the Marine's Hymn. The German food was really good. Tim had another scrumptious pork chop.

After lunch we bought tickets to ride the infamous Wisconsin Ducks. These are reclaimed WW2 amphibious vehicles. They use them to give tours of the Wisconsin River and surrounding area. So now we can say we rode The Ducks! Whoohoo!

We went out for dinner at a very nice steak place, The Newport Steak House, on Hwy 16 about 2 miles south of town. We sat by the big picture window overlooking a horse pasture and the Wisconsin River. After a glass of Cabernet and a filet mignon, the day was complete.

Back at the trailer I got my Bill O’Reilly fix watching the 10:00pm show. Boy, it's nice to be back at a campground with amenities like TV, Cell coverage, and WIFI.

Drove 17 miles

Today we just took it easy relaxing around the campground mostly except for a few hours spent at the Tanger Outlet Mall. We rode around some just to look at the sites but once you’ve seen 25 water slides, you feel like you’ve pretty much seen them all. There were almost as many roller coaster resorts as there were water slides but we managed to restrain ourselves.

I cooked dinner at the campsite – pork chops, broccoli and cheese and some left over rice. On a scale of 1 – 10, it was about a 3. No gourmet meal tonight!

Drove 445 miles

We headed west from Wisconsin Dells to the Mississippi River and crossed over into Minnesota. We stopped to take a picture or two to mark this milestone.

Then we bounced our way across Minnesota on I90. MN has those concrete highways where the joints have risen up about ½ foot so it literally made the truck and trailer bounce. The roads were so awful that at one point I asked Tim to pull off and stop so I could put on a sports bra. Then I remembered I didn’t own a sports bra. But it would have been a great thing if I had. ?

I had packed us a lunch before we took off this morning so around noon we pulled into a rest stop for another gourmet treat – PB&J sandwiches and chips!

When we FINALLY crossed the state line into South Dakota, we pulled into the Visitor Center and picked up some brochures to plan our stay. We were headed for The Black Hills area which is in the north western area of the state so we still had quite a way’s to go.

About 80 miles into South Dakota we decided to call it a day, and so we exited I90 for our first night at Wally World! Yes, that’s right. We stopped in Mitchell, SD, (home of the Corn Palace!) at a Walmart Super Center. What a hoot. Next morning I counted 9 RV’s besides ours in their parking lot. We had heard that they welcome RV’ers because they can always count on them to come in to the store and buy things. We were no exception to that rule. But as the old guy told me in Townsend, TN, “If Walmart don’t have it, you don’t need it!”

We didn’t have electric but the gas stove works just fine so I fixed us some ham steak, Brussels sprouts, and pasta for dinner. My cooking skills seem to be deteriorating with each day I’m away from my cookbooks.

At least we had good cell phone coverage there, so we researched some campgrounds out in The Black Hills and picked one called Rafter J Bar Ranch outside of Hill City, SD.

Drove 356 miles

We crossed the Missouri River and had breakfast at Al’s Oasis with 300 of our closest Corvette friends. (The Corvette Club is having a rally in Rapid City, SD this coming weekend.) We continued on I90 except for a side trip we took through the South Dakota Badlands on Hwy 240.

Our first stop was at a Historic Plains Homestead site. The Browns, Edgar and Alice, homesteaded 160 acres near the Badlands in 1909. It is their actual home with many of the original furnishings. Let me tell you - these were sturdy people that built a life out here on these plains. I couldn't have done it.

There is a colony of rare white prairie dogs around the site now. They are protected here because this is the only known colony of them.

It was a scenic bypass and the views were amazing. The pictures don’t really capture what we saw with the naked eye because we were passing through at high noon and the sun was so bright it washed out most of the color. Even so, it was wonderful.

Then it was on to Wall, SD to the famous Wall Drug! You see billboards all along the interstate, state after state, advertising this place (and it’s 5 cent per cup coffee) so we had to stop and see what it was all about. Amazing! The place is like one store after another all under one roof and it covers a whole city block. Well maybe that’s a “town” block because Wall Drug is almost the only thing in Wall, SD. Tim bought a really nice Stetson cowboy hat and I bought a lightweight Charlie 1 Horse cowgirl hat so now we’re really ready to hit the western trail. And check out the pictures from here on out of me in my new Brighton sunglasses. Too cool!

We reached the campground right around dinner time and were so surprised. The campground is beautiful. It covers hundreds of acres with almost all the RV sites under Ponderosa Pines surrounding beautiful rolling pastures. Our site was large with no one directly next to us, so Sprocket had plenty of territory to watch over.

We decided to head back into Hill City for dinner. We ate outside on the roof of a saloon looking place. Very nice!

Drove only 36 miles

I slept late (8:30am MTN time) awaking to find Tim had been up for hours. (Guess he hadn’t adjusted to MTN time yet.) He had toured the campground with Sprocket, taken a shower, checked his e-mail and gone over to the Campground tent for a pancake breakfast! (See what I miss when I sleep in?)

Our plan for the day was to take a ride on the “1880 Train” and then drive to Mt. Rushmore National Memorial but when we got to the train depot in Hill City, we found the train was sold out for the 10:00am departure. So we bought tickets for the next train at 1:00pm and reversed our plans. What a great day! Rushmore was awesome. We watched a movie in the theatre there at the memorial site that gave all the history about its making and about the artist that created it, Gutzon Borglun. I was sad to learn that after making this his life’s work, he died just 5 years before it was completed.

But the surprise of the day was the “1880 Train”. The engine is a 1928 Baldwin steam engine built to run on bunker oil and then converted to run on used motor oil. The fireman had to throw sand in the firebox when we went uphill to clean out the flue and boy did that old engine belch out some black smoke then!

The train runs between Hill City and Keystone, about an hour’s ride through some beautiful Black Hills forest. We spent a couple of hours in Keystone roaming through the shops and searching for a pizza place that had been recommended to us back in Hill City. The pizza was surprisingly good. Then we boarded the train for the return trip.

Once back at the campground, Tim rustled us up a nice western meal of sautéed garlic and shrimp in white wine sauce over linguini. Yummy even if it wasn’t exactly what the cowboys would have had.

Drove 27 miles

Started out the day with a pancake breakfast outside in the tent at the Campground office and then went over to the campground stables for a trail ride. It was a wonderful ride through the Black Hills National Forest. My horse was named Snickers and was unusual in that it had blue eyes! Tim’s horse was named Nipper because it tends to nip at the rear of the horse in front of it.

After the horseback trail ride we changed out of our jeans into some shorts for a bike ride from the campground to Hill City, a little over 3 miles away, by way of the Mickelson Trail. This wonderful facility was built on the Burlington Northern Railway right of way and covers 108.8 miles from Deadwood to Edgemont, SD.

Once we arrived in town we visited art galleries and jewelry stores (had to have some of that Black Hills gold, you know) until our stomachs told us it was lunchtime. We picked the Hill City Café, a pretty rustic place to eat. When we came out, the temperature had climbed to 101 degrees!!! We walked on through town to where we had parked our bikes, passing a bank clock thermometer on the way. By the time we got the camera out of the back pack, the temperature had dropped to 100 degrees. Oh that's a relief! :-) We started the bike ride back to the campground only to find it was an uphill grade and we were riding into the wind. I pooped out a little over halfway back. I seriously thought I was going to have a heat stroke. Tim left me by the trail, went back and got the truck and came and rescued me. After an hour or so in the air conditioning in the trailer, we were both good as new and ready for our next adventure.

We gathered up Sprocket, the camera and a map and rode down Hwy 16 and 385 to the Crazy Horse Memorial. What a surprise! I wasn’t expecting anything but a carving on the mountain, something like the one at Stone Mountain, GA. Once we got there we found there was a large Native American Culture Museum. We toured it and watched a movie about the undertaking. The history was interesting. In 1939, Lakota Chief Henry Standing Bear wrote a letter to sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski (an assistant to Broglum at Mt. Rushmore) asking him to design a similar monument to honor Indian culture. Korczak worked on it from 1939 until his death in 1982. He left behind a wife and 10 children who are carrying on his mission to this day. The sculture differs from Mt. Rushmore in that it is entirely private enterprise financed - no governmenet money is accepted, and it is designed to be a 3 dimensional carving depicting the bare chested warrior charging out of the mountainside atop his galloping horse. When completed it will stand 56 stories high and be more than two football fields in length. So far it shows Crazy Horse's head and his arm pointing out over the Black Hills to capture the essence of his famous saying, "My lands are everywhere my people are buried."

Tonight we decided to be a little more authentic to the area so we grilled out – barbequed boneless chicken thighs and corn on the cob.

We had originally planned to leave tomorrow but there are so many things to do in this area of the country, we changed our plans and decided to stay another day. We love this place! Someday we’d like to come back and actually ride the length of the Mickelson Trail, maybe staying at one of the beautiful mountain lodges we passed on our driving through the country side.

(There are pictures of Crazy Horse Memorial that I'll add to diary next week. Running out of time...Tim's ready to head out!)