Last night, as usual, I had to pee in the middle of the night. I unzipped the tent, we were sleeping in the ground tent because if you’ve been to the Badlands you know the wind blows, I mean really blows, I mean hold the tent down or you’re going to parasail to Wyoming blows!
Well anyways, back to my bladder, so I unzipped the tent and crawled out, pulled down my shorts and started to pee when I heard a snort! I looked up and 15 feet away was a huge buffalo watching me pee. What was I to do? They had been roaming in and out of our primitive camping area for 2 days and seemed pretty docile. Should I finish peeing? He seemed calm, but wouldn’t stop staring at me, the perv. What’s a lady to do?
Of course, I finished peeing! Wished him a good night and crawled back into my sleeping bag😁
The buffalo spent the days on the hillside around our camp and wandered down to the camp at dusk to spend the night with us. Last night we had 10 hunker down with us.
Today, we are taking a day off and going to the big city. Wall, SD, that is. A motel, showers and laundry are on the top of the list, closely followed by a visit to Dairy Queen.
We have been camping in the Rover for almost a month, and are due for a ‘cleaning up’ and some ‘treats’! Since they are predicting severe storms in the area, perhaps it’s not a good night to be sleeping in a rooftop tent.
We found a great little place online, The Sunshine Inn. John, the owner, treated us like we were family. We highly recommend staying here if you ever find yourself in Wall, SD.
The Sunshine Inn in Wall, SD. Our home away from the tent for a few nights.John, the owner of the Sunshine Inn. Thanks John for everything!
First stop, after showers was the laundry mat.
We definitely smell better!
Quickly followed by our first trip to Dairy Queen, yes, I said first…we don’t have Dairy Queen at home, so this was a highly anticipated treat!
Yes, that crazy eyed DQ inhaler is Darrin! A very happy boy😁
All cleaned up and fortified, we ventured into the tourist world of Wall Drugstore, the main attraction in the town, and the other stores on the mini main street. We wandered through stores, buying absolutely nothing…really, where would we put it. We spent the majority of our time looking at all if the old pictures. There were walls and walls of them, very cool. And watching people.
The world famous Wall Drugstore.The little tourist area around Wall Drug. I love the grain silos at the end.
That evening the predicted storm arrived. We stayed out on the balcony as long as we could with some fellow travelers watching it advance across the plains. It was really cool to see it start so far away and slowly make its way towards us. We definitely don’t get that in the northeast. And then it poured! And the wind blew! And the rain went sideways. It was a very grand storm, definitely not a night to be sleeping in the rooftop tent!
The poor little Rover weathered the storm quite well, only a few minor leaks.
Another night of storms arrived, so we ended up staying 2 nights…quite a luxury!
The small towns in northern Nebraska, as we understand it, have town parks that allow travelers and transient farm workers a place to stay. They are often just a few sites, most with drinking water, some with power and bathrooms, others with pit toilets.
We checked a few out on our way across Nebraska and found a really nice one in Valentine. It was clean, had flush toilets and even a nice brook. All for a donation.
The people were friendly, and their dogs of course. We even met the town cop as he did his rounds.
While we stayed here there were 5 tenters, an RV, a teardrop trailer, a traveling motorcyle group in another 8 tents, and a girl scout troop on a road trip (1 of the leaders thought Darrin looked like a young Kenny Rogers – he has been singing The Gambler ever since).
A great way to spend a few very, and I mean 100 degrees very, hot days.
We also saw the coolest vehicle, besides our Rover, in Nebraska.
A Volkswagen kit made into a trike. Very cool!
On to the mountains of South Dakota , and fingers crossed, some cooler weather.
Well, we thought we had evaded the dreaded heat wave…but alas, it is not to be. I’m beginning to think we are bringing it with us. Every place we go, with the exception of the few cool days with the woodstove, we find out they are having a heat wave.
A melted northern girl trying to cool down.
Happily, we have found a small city park where we can camp cheaply near a nice cool stream. So, we are hanging here for a few days before we continue north into SD and hopefully, some cooler weather and a bison or two.
Happy Memorial Day.
A big thank you to all the Veterans for their service.
In today’s world, it is sometimes easy to loose faith in ones fellow man, woman, child, etc. And to be honest, I was starting to wonder if our idea of traveling so we could meet all kinds of different people was only a pipe dream. At campgrounds, we have met a few nice people, but the majority of people have been very stand-off’ish. We have been stared at, had our picture taken by people doing ‘drive-bys’ and sometimes totally ignored (Darrin, the optimist says they must not want to intrude).
Then we stumbled into, completely on a fluke, a small state park in northern Nebraska. We were making a quick exit, well as quick as our little Rover can go, from predicted storms in Iowa, tornadoes are not on our “must experience list”.
We looked at weather forecasts and the area we had thought to go in northern Iowa was under flood alerts, so Darrin suggested Nebraska, not a state we had intended to enter. I pulled out our 20 year old atlas and there in the very northwest corner was Ponca State Park.
We checked their weather forecast and it looked much better, so we packed our stuff and headed out. What a great decision!
We met the nicest people! Our campground host, the park staff and our fellow campers were all amazingly friendly and helpful.
Bob road his bike by every day to visit. We also met his wife Marlene who told great stories.Sherl and John, our campgound neighbors, shared their fire and stories with us. Thanks!They also shared their dog, Sophie. Hi Sophie!Steve an Kris shared their company and great knowledge of the area. Steve even went out of his way to find us a NE map. Thanks! And Cookie, their dog.And the best for last. The person who made Ponca SP a really welcoming place, Tony, our camp host. He helped us find a site, drove us around the campground and even took us downtown to the grocery store! Thanks Tony! We really enjoyed sharing a meal and Oreos with you. Hi to Asta…give her a scratch for us.
These are just a few of the many people we met during our 5 day stay. Many other people stopped by to visit. We enjoyed meeting each and everyone.
Remember how we said we wanted to get north out of the heat? Nebraska decided to help us out. 50s during the day and 40s at night, with a little rain, okay it poured, thrown in for good measure. No, this isn’t normal Nebraska weather…they ordered it just for us!
To show we are true northerners, and know just what to do in chilly weather, we fired-up the woodstove!
Only a northerner would travel with a wood stove attachment!Darrin tending the fire.And me slaving over the hot stove preparing dinner. Check out my pretty purple curtains!
Those of you who grew up camping in state parks, know what we mean when we say we did the “Sunday wood clean-up after all the weekenders left”, so the heat from the woodstove was 100% free.
The west has really big mountains, New England has smaller mountains, and Missouri has rolling hills, very much like a kiddie rollercoaster. Up and down…up and down.
Up an down, up and down, with a few “thank yo ma’ams” to boot.
Missouri and Iowa also have water towers. Every town, and sometimes every corner, has their own water tower with their name printed on it in huge letters, and sometimes the mascot of their school team. All of the water towers we have seen look freshly painted and full of town pride.
And last, but not least is the huge crop of windmills they are growing in western Iowa!
There were a ton of these everywhere we looked for a while. The funny thing was out here they didn’t seem like a scar as they do at home when they put them on the mountain ridges. I can’t say why.
We were cooking breakfast this morning and Darrin said “Hey, it looks like we are having a Braudis Breakfast!”.
I said “What’s that?”.
Apparently, a Braudis Breakfast is a 3 course meal that Darrin and his winter camping buds look forward to when planning their January forays into the wild. Chris Braudis takes the breakfast cooking reins and Mike and Darrin sit back and enjoy the good eatings.
In this case, I am sitting back and enjoying Darrin whipping me up a delightful breakfast, so I guess he is Chris and I’ll do my best to imitate Mike!
Here are some pics of Darrin cooking, notice our really cool kitchen set-up!
Darrin concentrating over the stove, which sits on a drop down shelf attached to the backdoor. Behind him is our kitchen drawers and the fridge.And viola…The Braudis Breakfast! Yum!Sorry Bill🙄😁
Well, our GPS took us on another adventure! This time onto a back road in MO with two infamous swinging bridges. Now I don’t know about you, but when I think of swinging bridges, I think of the walking bridge I used to have to take after school to my paino teacher’s house. It went across a small creek, the boys would try to get it swinging to make the girls scream (usually didn’t work since we were country girls who didn’t frighten easily) and sadly a big storm washed it away never to be replaced.
But, I digress, these bridges were nothing of the sort. These bridges were straight out of an Indiana Jones movie, steel cables, horizontal boards that moved and bounced under the car and skinny slats to drive across that were in no way wide enough for the Rover’s tires, the whole works. I expected to see a whip come shooting out of the trees to swing us all to safety as we plummeted to the raging river below.
Of course, we could have turned around and found another route, but that wouldn’t have been half as interesting or blog worthy! Our trusty Rover got us through, thank goodness since there were half a dozen Missouri boys fishing on the bank underneath and watching our progress. I’m sure they went home with a good story about the funny car that passed over their bridge.
Wait for it…
Holy crapolla…I wanted to take more pictures but I was too busy holding on!
