I can see for miles and miles and miles

Today two songs were competing for the title of the blog. The Who's I can see for miles and miles and miles (lyrics) and Springsteen's Badlands (lyrics) as the day was split almost equally between travelling through the large expanse of countryside in the south of North Dakota and the north of South Dakota and then visiting the Badlands in South Dakota. The Who won on the grounds that the badlands get 277 pictures so the song gets the theme of the earlier part of the day. Below is one of the images of the miles and miles and miles of prairie:

The day began with breakfast at the Comfort Inn, how nice to be back to Comfort Inn breakfasts, of course being Friday I couldn't have any of the meat, but still the eggs and the waffle was great, as were the orange juice and coffee. Drew opted for two very sugary doughnuts, he is catching the American like for sweet breakfasts.

Today I had planned as a day for driving along the smaller roads of the Dakota's. I like to drive through places no one else visits and it complements the faster driving of the Interstates of the last two days. I had mapped out a route down the ND-6 and the SD-63 and we followed that for most of the way. But we also agreed that if times worked out OK we would fit in a visit to the Badlands National Park. So the route looked like this:

Click here to see the full route.


Note the place names in the map are an post-hoc identification of the route, we had not planned to stop there, just to do the route. But it turned out we did make these stops.

As we left Bismarck at 8.30 a.m. we travelled over the Missouri, our constant companion for the last five days or so, this is the last time we will see the river on this trip. Hence the photo as we crossed the river for the last time. 

The route took us through lovely countryside that went on, as the song goes, for miles and miles and miles. The road soon entered the Standing Rock Indian Reservation which is a large reservation area that straddles North and South Dakota. It was such a pleasure to drive in this open prairie. When we saw a car, perhaps every 30 minutes or so, it came as a surprise. You could almost forget someone else is likely to be on the road :-)

We pulled over after an hour and a half at a small village called Selfridge. Having bought postcards yesterday, and written them last night, we saw Selfridge had a post office, so stopped there to buy stamps and post the cards. It was unusual when walking in to the post office for the lady who ran it to look surprised, I had obviously disturbed her unexpectedly. Clearly she didn't get many visitors in her post-office. Though she turned out to be a very friendly person.

At this point we started the most complex stamp purchase of my life. I asked if she could let me have 6 stamps for overseas postcards. She explained she only had 30c stamps and would those do - I didn't know. She then said she had a leaflet somewhere and went off to find her guide, to come back and explain that an overseas postcard needed a $1.10 stamp. So I asked for 6 of these, she looked perplexed and then said I'd have to wait a moment as stamps of such high denomination were kept in the safe. The stamps came and I was able to have 6 $1 stamps and 6 10c stamps. Though by the time she had got the stamps from the safe she thought I wanted 10, so I needed to remind her.

Rigmarole over, I put the stamps on the cards and posted them, the postmistress had confirmed a daily collection did take place. Drew took a photo of me posting the cards, as evidence in case they get lost between here and the UK.

We drove on from Selfridge and came to the South Dakota state line. This is also the point that we moved from the Central Time Zone to Mountain Time. So we come back an hour and 10.20 became 9.20. Note South Dakota is one of the few states which has separate time zones between East (Central Time) and West (Mountain Time).

We next came to the pretty town of Timber Lake, though the clocks said it was 10 past 10, my body knew it was 10 past 11, so I was ready for a coffee stop. We drove off the SD-63 into the town and spotted a restaurant that said it was open. We went in and asked for two coffees and these were delivered  The restaurant was called the Coop (as in the thing chicken's are kept in, not as in Co-op which is how I first read it). 

A local couple came in soon after and on seeing Drew take a photo of the Coop coffee cup asked if we were visitors. This lead into a conversation and they introduced themselves as Mary Jane and Dick Anderson who were ranchers just outside Timber Lake. Note I said ranchers, I'd inadvertently asked them if they were farmers, no they are not, they are ranchers! I assume the difference being the keep cattle not grow anything. A case of two nations divided by one language. They asked us to have breakfast with them, but we politely declined and explained we needed to be on our way.

So on our way we were, after Timber Lake there was nothing for miles and my stomach began to despair of seeing food again. Thankfully at 12.30 (1.30 pm by my stomachs times - 5 hours since we had last eaten) we came to a small town called Midland and found the Midland Food and Fuel Stop. 

Drew had a cheeseburger and fries (right) while I opted for a 'Fish Sandwich' (left) which was a square of fish (not unlike a fish finger in texture) cooked and put in a bun with tomato and lettuce. Sometimes Friday's are not very penitential for me, as I like eating fish, but today's lunch was certainly not something I would have eaten if it had not been Friday. Though that being said the chips were very nice, made with unpeeled potatoes giving them extra flavour and roughage. <<co-pilots note: you haven't mentioned the cowboys. How can you not mention the cowboys >> Yes true, I'd not mentioned this. But we were joined in the dining room by a local couple one of whom had on a stetson and was also wearing spurs.

Having spent five hours on the scenic byways of the Dakotas, it was time to move back to the main roads and the second part of the day, a visit to the Badlands National Park.

Drew loved this place with its broken landscape and strange shapes. He was taking photos every couple of yards. You can see all 277 of them on this link in Flickr. It is an awe inspiring place, partly because of the geography and partly for the people who have lived here, both the Sioux and Lakota for whom this was sacred land, to the white pioneers who tried, and often failed, to eke out a living here. A 19 mile drive took about two hours. I did get out to see some of the most special sites, but I left much of it to Drew. With the temperature getting to 93 degrees I preferred the air-con in the car, to the heat outside.

We then travelled along the I-90 to Sturgis and turned on to the 14 which brought us down to Deadwood, a lovely wooded route. We checked in at the hotel at 18:50, 11 hours and 20 minutes after leaving Bismarck, our longest day so far, but with so much to see and do.