We left Wall early this morning and headed to Badlands. This park is situated in the midst of formations of rock layers formed by erosion. There are some nice views that are kind of reminiscent of The Painted Desert. It's a pretty harsh environment, without a whole lot of wildlife to view. The exception, however, is the prairie dogs. In one section of the park, they're everywhere. It's called Roberts Prairie Dog Village and the small animals and their burrows were everywhere you looked.
Also, there's a spot where they're doing an archaelogical dig called The Big Pig Dig where they're extracting fossils of an extinct, pig-like animal called Archaeotherium. Here, we talked to a ranger for a few minutes who explained some of the history of fossils in the park.
Afterwards, we drove back to Rapid City for dinner. I had read somewhere that M.I.A's new album was to come out today, so with our time to kill we drove around and looked for it. Unfortunately, I found out later that it doesn't come out until August 20. That was pretty disappointing. I thought it was going to give me something to look forward to over the 1200 mile drive I have coming up over the next two days.
I'm taking Agent Orange to the airport tomorrow here in Rapid City. We've had a really great time and I've still got more to come. Hopefully, I'll be at Mammoth Cave in Kentucky on Friday, but it's going to be two days of hard drivin'.
One other interesting note from today: as we were driving down an unpaved farm road leaving Badlands, a grasshopper landed on the windshield and crawled down onto the wiper blade. Even though we were driving 50-60 MPH, he managed to hang on. Even as we stopped to get gas, he didn't move. As we got onto the interstate, we figured 80+ MPH speeds would blow him off; but somehow he stayed on the windshield wiper. At one point, we slowed to about 45 for construction, and he crawled down under the hood from the top. We figured we would never see him again and he might be cooked by the heat of the engine. So, we forgot about him, drove for probably another half hour and had dinner. After dinner, we drove to the movie theater in Rapid City to see what time Live Free or Die Hard is playing tomorrow so we can catch it before we have to drive to the airport. When we started to drive away, the grasshopper was on the windshield. Keep in mind, nearly 4 hours had passed since this insect had jumped onto the car. As we pulled away, he hopped off. It was pretty incredible. If we see him on the car tomorrow when we're leaving the hotel, I'll be a little freaked out.
1 comment:
Post day 22 already!!
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