Coming from Hot Springs, we decided to enter the Badlands National Park via the southeast entrance, seeing hints and badland teasers as we approached. Nothing could have prepared us for the view as we crested the hill and dropped into the area known as Cedar Pass. And, we were staying at the Cedar Pass Campground. Cue the squeals!
I visited the Black Hills in 1983 and put it on the top of my list of places to visit again. It only took 33 years! I’m finally back, and Doug is getting to see this beautiful place for the first time. Some of the tourist towns have grown, attractions have received face lifts, and more vacationers have discovered the Black Hills, yet it remains every bit as beautiful as I remembered…
Tough morning…
And, yes, we do realize how fortunate we are to have these days.
Continue reading “ND Badlands – Theodore Roosevelt National Park”
Folks told us we’d be bored with all the flatness and corn fields of eastern and central South Dakota and North Dakota. ‘Take the interstate. Drive 80 mph along with the trucks. Suck it up and get it over with.’ Trucks? Hmm. Plus, 65 mph in our rig feels almost too fast, and we haven’t driven 100 miles straight on an interstate since we left Maine. To top it off, the sights we wanted to see called for a diagonal route through both states and the interstates just don’t go that way – but, hey look, some of these state roads do!
Joe introduced me to Mike in 2007. Mike’s company Axia Strategies, a small healthcare consulting firm based in Savage, MN, needed to add a clinician to one of their client teams. That started a nearly 10-year relationship between our respective consulting firms. Mike and I shared a similar client service philosophy and a passion for craft brews, and he shared with me his love for the midwest. Mike’s work travel, a new grand-baby, getting 4 kids off to college, and managing a high-schooler’s sports schedule made arranging a get-together kind of tricky, but we were fortunately able to meet with Mike in Minneapolis for a great lunch. It was so fun to catch up, live, on his turf!
This schedule also gave us a couple of days to explore more of MN. We opted to stay along the St. Croix River where we enjoyed a gorgeous bike ride along the rolling hills near the WI border. We visited Pipestone National Monument, the sacred Indian mines. And since we were headed toward SD, Mike provided local intel on back roads to see MN prairies. And of course, corn…
Thanks Mike!
More photos of So Minnesota and Pipestone National Monument…
Our modus operandi has been to make up this adventure as we go along, so we haven’t planned much. Occasionally, we make reservations if we’d like to visit a popular area on a weekend. So far, it’s worked out, and what we thought could be our first shut-out turned into another high point…
There couldn’t have been a better place than Palisade Head, near Silver Bay, MN, on a stunningly beautiful day, to say our farewell to the Great Lakes. On June 19 we were in Cape Vincent, NY, where Lake Ontario becomes the St. Lawrence Seaway, and for the better part of the next 8 weeks we were awed, entertained, and educated on the Lakes. One of the areas in the U.S. that neither Doug nor I had been in, we’re happy that we chose to explore these Great Lakes on our great adventure.
We pulled into Duluth, MN and I started to squeal. We hadn’t even arrived at our destination (details in the next post…) when I saw it! A laker, parked at the marina among a bunch of pleasure boats. You could literally touch it. I did!
My cousin Jean was 18 years old the day I was born, and she joined the army 8 months later. Two years after that, she married her sweetheart and moved to Wisconsin. Needless to say, I never knew my cousin. We met for the first time at her mom’s memorial service about 10 years ago. We decided we needed to connect and planned to do so at some time in the future which finally happened this week…
Continue reading “On Wisconsin: Pelican Lake and the Apostle Islands”
The ‘Simply Superior, part 1’ title for the earlier post started out as a joke – I saw it on a roadway sign and thought it sounded cool. Yet, there is decidedly an eastern and a western UP – we’re not sure where the line is. We clearly crossed the line somewhere between Munising and Marquette, MI. Both halves share the beauty of Lake Superior and its shoreline, a penchant for winter sports (the locals talk wistfully about snowmobiling and ice fishing all summer), and the highest average daily spotting of tourists driving around in RVs since we started this adventure. The Hiawatha National Forest with its endless views of flat terrain, scrub pines and wetlands dominates the eastern half and most of the towns cater to tourists whether lake or snow related. The western half is all about mining (and evidence of its related current or former prosperity) and higher education. The terrain becomes hilly and the forests more deciduous. Hard to explain, but palpable…