The Hamster and the Highway

Well that was a complete disaster.

The day started innocently enough. We should have known from the moment we tried to leave our hotel in Seattle Monday morning and had to spend 45 minutes jamming all our stuff into the car while leaving enough room for three people, only to have it all repeatedly topple over onto person #3 (that would be The Hamster) every time we made a right turn. But we didn’t know. We figured it was a momentary setback. We pressed on.

Things were going reasonably well for a little while. We got to Mount Rainier National Park right on schedule. The mountain was stunning from every angle.

The surrounding scenery was even more gorgeous, with waterfall after waterfall, each one more incredible than the one before.

Then, another little clue of what was to come: we almost got a parking ticket outside the Paradise Visitors Center. But we got to the car moments before the park rangers plastered it with a large sticker telling us what jerks we were. We thought it was a sign of our good fortune. Oh, we were so young and foolish back then.

Done with Mount Rainier, I squeezed in the back seat and let Sam sit in the front so he could avoid being whacked by falling coolers, and we told the GPS to bring us to Mount St. Helens. It obeyed. But then, a good 40 minutes into the trip, we saw a big sign on the highway saying that Mount St. Helens was a different way. We decided to ignore the GPS and obey the sign. This was a huge mistake. Volcanic eruption huge.

What I knew was that you can enter Mount St. Helens National Monument from the East or from the West; the GPS was sending us to the West entrance but the big sign sent us to the East. What I didn’t know, and what the big sign didn’t mention, was that the two entrances do not connect, and that only the West entrance leads to the observatory, and that the West entrance is accessible by normal highways while the East entrance is accessible only through exceptionally windy roads that go for miles and miles through a National Forest with no phone or Internet signal. An hour and change later, we arrived at a little viewing area, only to learn that the place we really wanted to go was completely on the other side of the park and the only way to get there was to go back the way we came and then drive for a couple more hours.

By this point it was 5:30 pm. Probably too late to get to the observatory before dark. But the road to the observatory was also the road to our next stop (Portland, OR), so we figured we’d do our best and see what happens. And that’s when things got worse.

A police car pulled up behind us, lights flashing. We pulled over. He sped by. He pulled over a different car. Whew! We got lucky. We drove past them. The cop motioned for us to pull over also. Then he chased us down. Not so lucky after all. It was a double ticketing. He didn’t buy our story about being lost on the way to Mount St. Helens. He gave us a ticket for speeding. He also said Sam was too young to be in the front seat and would have to sit in the back, according to Washington state law. Then he gave us directions to Mount St. Helens.

Now it was 7:30 pm. We had no chance. Defeated, we pulled into the first rest stop we saw and got set to make dinner: fresh halibut we’d bought Sunday and froze so we could grill it Monday night. The only problem was that it was still frozen when we took it out to put it on the grill. Not a little frosty—frozen solid. Well, at least the cooler did a good job. We grilled it anyway. It took almost an hour. We tried to laugh about our mistakes and misfortune. It wasn’t easy.

The only thing that really helped was Sam. He was fantastic. Better than fantastic. Sarah and I just wanted the day to be over already but Sam was dancing around the rest-stop picnic table, singing nonsense songs and having fun despite everything. For the first time in a few hours, we all smiled.

It was completely dark by the time we finished eating and squeezed back into the car to start looking for a place to spend the night, hoping Tuesday would be better.

As much fun as we’d been having over the past two and a half weeks, The Hamster and I both missed Sarah terribly. We’d been anxiously looking forward to arriving in Seattle for a week, partly because we were excited to see Seattle but mostly because we were excited to see Sarah. The reunion Friday did not disappoint.

There were some inevitable hiccups over the weekend, though. Going from a two-person road trip to a three-person road trip in the middle of the trip presents several challenges. Another personality. Another opinion. Another set of expectations. And Sam and I have developed methods and habits and routines over the first half of the trip—how we get going and packed in the morning, when and how we stop for meals, etc.—that Sarah has stepped into without even realizing it. It wasn’t too long before there was some snapping, some toe-stepping, and some general crankiness.

The most significant challenge by far, though, was packing the car. We’ve got a little bit more stuff now, and a lot less space to jam it into now that we have to use half of the back seat for an actual person. As I write this (it’s so nice to be in a moving vehicle that I’m not driving), Sam is trapped in the back seat next to a tower of coolers and bags to the point that every time we make a right turn he has to brace the piles so that he doesn’t get buried alive.

I should probably mention at this point that Seattle was lots of fun despite our new-dynamic growing pains. We started Sunday with the Space Needle, which was a great call because we went straight to the top with no wait and only a few dozen other people there, but by the time we left everyone else in the northwest had shown up and the place was packed. The view was somewhat limited because it was an overcast, drizzly day, but that just made it a more authentic Seattle experience.

From there we went to the famous Pike Place Market, hoping to see some fish being thrown at the fish market. The fish throwers were there and raring to go but nobody bought any giant fish during the 10 minutes we stood there. I considered buying one just so they could throw it, but what on earth am I going to do with a giant salmon? I barely have room in the car for Sam.

While at the market we made sure to stop at the famous Gum Wall, a brick wall where somebody once stuck his or her chewed-up bubble gum, someone else did the same, and now the entire wall is wallpapered with thousands upon thousands of colorful, germ-covered blobs of gum. Sam and I had fun adding our own. Sarah was content just to take pictures.

Of the many street performers at the market, we found this guy the most entertaining by far:

Next up was a Mariners game at Safeco Field. Some dude in the elevator at our hotel told us that his friend has been to every major league ballpark and Safeco is the nicest of all of them. I’ve now been to every major league ballpark but one, plus a whole lot than no longer exist, and although I enjoyed Safeco I wouldn’t even put it in the top five. On the outside the park looks like an ugly, dark warehouse.

On the inside it’s far nicer. One of the problems I’ve noticed with all the stadiums that have retractible roofs is that even when the roof is open it’s still a little bit closed, giving the stadium something of an indoor feel even when you can see the sky. By keeping two of the sides of the building low and thus open even when the roof is closed, Safeco has avoided this problem and given the ballpark something of an outdoor feel even when the roof is shut. We got to experience both scenarios by arriving while the roof was still open and then watching it close for the rain shortly before the game started.

Another thing Safeco does well is food. Sadly, there’s no kosher stand, but Seattle was one of the first teams to start getting creative with ballpark food and there’s plenty of evidence of that all over the park.

(That last guy is selling “Shishkaberry,” chocolate-covered strawberries on a stick. Genius!)

It’s also the most kid-friendly ballpark I’ve ever been to. Just about every staff member we walked past handed Sam a random baseball card, Guest Services printed him a customized certificate commemorating his first visit (they also had Mariners schedules printed in Spanish, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Cambodian), and Sam was able to go on the field and run the bases after the game.

It’s just too bad the Mariners are so incredibly bad at baseball, or it would have been a truly great afternoon.

The evening was spent grocery shopping for the next few days, going underneath the Aurora Bridge to find the Fremont Troll …

… and grilling our last meat meal for the next week (hot dogs and corn on the cob).

All three of us really enjoyed Seattle. It’s well-designed, it’s clean, it’s friendly, it’s quirky, it’s got interesting neighborhoods, and it’s experimenting with unusual forms of public transportation. We would have liked to spend another couple of days there getting to know the city better. Alas, Monday beckoned with a completely new itinerary. My favorite part: Sarah does all the driving.

Well, we did it. We started in New York, and we’re now in Seattle, which means we have literally driven cross-country. And it feels like we did all that driving today.

That’s what the GPS looked like after about 45 miles on the road this morning. And I should point out that it’s not telling us we have 529 miles left until our destination; it’s telling us we have 529 miles left until our next turn. We were on the road for 10 hours, including about an hour’s worth of stops for gas, bathrooms, stretching, etc. (We stopped in Idaho’s panhandle not really because we needed to but because I felt bad making it the only state we’d be driving through without stopping.)

By FAR the most interesting thing we saw today was a group of especially outgoing chipmunks at a rest stop somewhere in western Montana. I gave Sam a slice of bread to feed them, and within seconds he made a bunch of new friends.

Five or six hours later, though, we were not in such good moods. I was sore all over. He was bored. We fought.

The good news: we made up, we finally arrived in Seattle, Sarah’s here and will be with us for a week, and we’re staying in the same hotel for three whole nights in a row, which means I get a respite not just from driving but from unpacking and repacking the car every morning and night.

The bad news: we have two more all-day drives coming up in about a week and a half.

For the Hamster and I, a big focus of our trip is to see things we’ve never seen and do things we’ve never done. We also wanted to do as many particularly American things as possible: skyscrapers … baseball … cowboys … driving. Tonight we checked off one of the big ones on both lists: the rodeo.

Forget attending a rodeo–we had never even seen one on TV before. When I left home 2+ weeks ago the extent of my rodeo knowledge was that Luke Perry was in that rodeo movie, “8 seconds,” a few years back, and I didn’t see the movie. And Sam knew even less than I: he couldn’t even tell you who Luke Perry is.

So we had both been looking forward to tonight’s rodeo since I bought the tickets a few weeks back. And this was not just any rodeo, no sir. This was a PRCA event, the major leagues of rodeo. This one only comes to Helena once a year. Which worked out perfectly because Sam and I only come to Helena once … ever.

It was also pretty fortunate because there’s really not much else to do in Helena. That’s not just the New Yorker in me talking, either. I went looking for things to do on the official Helena tourism website, and under “Family Fun” there are only five things listed, including a carousel. Not an amusement park WITH a carousel–just a carousel, sitting all by itself in a small public park. Most other attractions here revolve around fishing, hunting, or camping. Did I mention this is the state capitol?

There was actually a nice boat ride I was planning to take, but the fear of boats that Sam suddenly developed in Niagara Falls and forgot about for our water taxi ride in Chicago surfaced again and he nixed the plan. We ended up spending a couple of hours at Last Chance Splash, a nice public pool that was surprisingly inexpensive ($4 for each of us) and had two cool waterslides. We still had a couple of hours to kill and wound up running a couple of little errands, stopping by the capitol building, and watching “Rocky” in our motel room before finally heading out to the Last Chance Stampede and Fair for the rodeo.

Lucky for us, Montana Lindsey came up big again, e-mailing me a thorough primer on rodeo events and scoring. Armed with just enough knowledge to vaguely understand the proceedings, we found some well-located butt space on one of the grandstand benches and curiously watched it all unfold.

Tonight was the first night of a three-night rodeo. The theme for tonight was Military Appreciation Night, which mostly meant that there were American flags everywhere, uniformed service members unfurling the flag for the Anthem, and a whole lot of pandering nonsense being spouted by the announcer/host/ringmaster. One prime example:

“Freedoms we take for granted every day are the freedom to worship in the church of your choice, the freedom to own a gun, and the freedom to go to a rodeo on a Thursday night.”

Once the actual competition got going, though, we couldn’t have had a better time. Well, maybe if our seats had backs and/or cushions. But I digress.

We had a great time cheering on all the local boys (i.e., anyone from Montana, and there were several) in bareback riding …

… steer wrestling …

… team roping …

… saddle bronc …

… calf roping …

… barrel racing (the one event performed by women) …

… and the grand finale, bull riding (sorry, all my bull riding pictures came out extremely blurry).

The Hamster and I both had some concern for the well being of the animals but we were assured that they are all well treated and walk off healthy and happy as soon as it’s over. Just like shopping at Wal-mart, I’m not 100% convinced that it’s really OK but I enjoyed it anyway.

Meanwhile, impressing Sam even more than the rodeo was what I guess is roughly equivalent to a halftime show: between events two FMX (freestyle motocross) riders set up two huge ramps and did crazy tricks and flips while flying between them.

Despite the primer I got beforehand, three things really surprised me about the rodeo:

1) How heartily the people around me laughed at the extraordinarily trite fat jokes the rodeo clown kept telling about himself

2) How few competitors in each event actually performed the event successfully, let alone well

3) How the announcer guy, the clown, and the music over the PA system all continued doing their thing even while cowboys were performing

I wonder if #2 and #3 are related in any way, but I think a more realistic explanation for #2 is that the sport of rodeo is extremely difficult and these guys only get one chance at it per night. Either way it was a great night that Hamster and I both thoroughly enjoyed.

Friday morning (and afternoon) we’ll drive eight hours or so to Seattle. As excited as I am to be spending the upcoming weekend in a major city bursting with exciting things to do and see, I’m definitely going to miss Montana’s wildlife, its endless views of the Rockies, its 75-mph speed limits, its lack of significant traffic and crowds, and its excellent tour guide.

What a nice, relaxing, fun day we had Wednesday!

The day started at the Wal-Mart in Bozeman, Montana. This in itself was an experience. Comparing my local Wal-Mart in New York to the Wal-Mart here (or to the Wal-Marts anywhere else outside New York, really) is like comparing a pigeon to a bald eagle. We bought fresh produce, found items on the shelves they were supposed to be on, and got an oil change and had our car’s fuel lines cleaned while we shopped. I know Wal-Mart is an evil, power-wielding, workers’-rights-snuffing, mom-and-pop-killing megalocorporation and everything, but we got an an oil change and had our car’s fuel lines cleaned while we shopped. It’s hard to hate a place that lets me multitask like this.

[Side note: How crazy is it that I needed an oil change? I got an oil change three weeks ago. Since then I’ve driven more than 3,500 miles. We’re going to need to squeeze in another oil change in another couple of weeks–probably somewhere around Kansas or Missouri.]

Anyway, restocked and re-oiled we headed to Bozeman’s main attraction, the Museum of the Rockies. It’s kind of like New York’s Museum of Natural History, but much smaller, much more kid-oriented, and Ben Stiller has made many fewer movies about it. There was a fun frog exhibit that Sam loved and a planetarium star show that I loved, but Montana is a hotbed of dinosaur fossil discoveries and the museum is known for its dinosaur stuff.  Before you even get in the building you meet Big Mike:

Inside there were lots of full skeletons and other great fossils, including T-Rexes, a whole family of triceratopses, and a nine-foot long rib bone that simultaneously made me hungry and put me in the mood to watch The Flinstones. We even got to see a couple of archaeologists cleaning some bones.

[Side note #2: There’s just something about dinosaurs that fascinates young boys. When I was a little kid I was a total dinosaur freak. Sam’s not quite as obsessed as I used to be but I’ve never met a boy under the age of 10 who didn’t think dinosaurs are cool. Maybe it’s because they’re the closest things to real monsters we’ve got. Maybe it’s because nobody knows how or why they disappeared. Maybe it’s because there are a bunch of different kinds with weird names and characteristics, just like all the action/adventure toys/cartoons little boys are into but sanctioned by our teachers (well, by teachers in most states, anyway).]

I should mention at this point that we were joined at the museum by our Montana/Wyoming/Idaho tour guide, Lindsey, and her two young sons. I worked with Lindsey for two years and I’ve known her for about four but this was the first time we met in person, which gave the afternoon a sort of odd mix of newness and familiarity that I don’t think I’d ever experienced before but very much enjoyed.

Continuing our incremental traversing of the hunormous state of Montana, our next stop (without Lindsey, et al.) was Lewis and Clark Caverns State Park about 40 minutes to the west. After seeing the extremely impressive Jewel Cave just a few days ago I would have been willing to skip the park’s namesake cavern but Sam decided he still had some more caving in him. This cave was nowhere near as large or as colorful as Jewel Cave but had far more stuff growing from the ceiling, floor, and walls, which impressed Sam immensely. This cave tour was also much more strenuous, starting with a 3/4-mile hike up a slope that rose 300 feet just to get to the cave entrance. Once inside, there was a colony of pregnant bats to quietly sneak past and a bunch of low ceilings and stalactites to duck under, making for quite an adventure. At one point the tunnel was so small that we all had to slide about six feet on our butts, which Sam and I both thought was pretty fun and made the cave tour more of an adventure. We both also noticed that the slab of rock we slid on was shaped like a curved W. Basically, decades of people’s sliding had literally carved a butt-shaped groove into what had once presumably been flat limestone. I thought this was pretty amusing. Sam though this was HILARIOUS, and talked about it for the next two hours, including to the cute 17-year-old girl he chatted up on the way out of the cave.

[Side note #3: The Hamster has been surprisingly outgoing throughout this entire trip. He’s warmed up to and briefly befriended kids almost everywhere we’ve been. In Cleveland he even played Marco Polo in the hotel pool with a whole group of kids of various ages. He wasn’t an unfriendly kid before but he never would have just started talking to some random kid, let alone a teenage girl. He might just be getting older and better at socializing but I think his new extroversion has more to do with the fact that he’s been spending all his time with me and is somewhat starved for other kids to play with. I’ve actually found myself being much more chatty with strangers than I usually am, too. When I checked out of our motel Wednesday morning I spent 10 minutes talking with the front desk guy about what the Mets will do with Carlos Beltran. I think despite the fun we’re having with each other maybe Sam and I are both unconsciously reaching out for peers wherever we can find them.]

After the cave tour we found a nice picnic spot in the park where we could grill dinner. The weather was beautiful, the scenery was beautiful, and I busted out the special treat I had been keeping on ice for the past week: a big, fat, juicy steak.

Not bad for a portable, tabletop grill. And while the steak was cooking we each got to catch up with Mom over the phone.

[Side note #4: We’re almost done with the 9 consecutive days without access to kosher restaurants or groceries, and I’m ready to pat myself on the back for getting us through it in relative style. I was a bit worried that we would have to survive the last few days on ramen and peanut butter but we’ve actually eaten pretty well every day and have enough food to continue doing so until we arrive in Seattle Friday afternoon.]

This was neither the busiest nor the most exciting day we’ve had so far, but it was definitely one of the most pleasant.

The next time you travel to a place you’ve never been and know nothing about, I highly recommend coincidentally having a friend who lives there, knows the place like Sacajawea knew the Louisiana Purchase, and enjoys dispensing information. That’s what I’ve done for the Montana part of my trip, and it’s worked out very well.

The Hamster and I spent the entire day Tuesday in Yellowstone National Park. Well, not the entire day, exactly. After the previous night’s dinner debacle I let Sam sleep late and we didn’t hit the road until about 10.

The road we hit was also a slow one. On the recommendation of our shirpa, Lindsey, we entered Yellowstone through the Northeast Entrance. The road that takes you there, Beartooth Highway, winds and weaves its way up the mountains that surround Yellowstone instead of cutting through a gap like the other roads into the park. Those mountains, which top out at over 10,000 feet, make Beartooth Highway the highest-elevation highway in the country and provide its users with some incredible views–especially views of the snow that stays atop these mountains year-round. The only downside was that we didn’t enter the park until about 1 pm, but that still left us more than seven hours to explore.

I don’t quite know how to describe the enormity of the place except to say that, however big you think Yellowstone is, it’s bigger than that. We saw waterfalls, cliffs, forest, lakes, rivers, creeks, prairies, mountains, bison, bears, elk, deer, ducks, chipmunks, sulfur pits, bubbling mudpots, pools of steaming hot water in freakish colors thanks to bacteria, a whole family of geysers, and much more. We crossed the Continental Divide (twice)!Sam loved it even more than I did, partly because he didn’t have the mystery of where and when we’d sleep when we were done in the back of his mind all day and partly because the Park Ranger at the entrance gave him a cute animal checklist that he thoroughly enjoyed checking off throughout the afternoon/evening.

The park was so extraordinary that instead of trying vainly to find the words I’ll just show you some of my favorite images. I hope you enjoy.

Today was not the most fun day The Hamster has had on our road trip, but it was easily his most impressive.

The day started in Deadwood, where we visited the graves of Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane. You know a town is too touristy when even the cemetery has its own souvenir shop. Even the graves themselves were recently redone with new headstones to impress the out-of-towners. The whole town was such a sleazy tourist trap that we nixed our other Deadwood stops and headed straight to the center of America.

When Alaska and Hawaii became states the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association did some figgurin’ and found the geographic center of the United States to be a spot just outside the town of Belle Fourche, SD. I had no knowledge of this until Saturday, when I stumbled across it while leafing through one of those cheesy hotel “magazines” about what to do in the area. Turns out Belle Fourche installed a decorative granite compass marking the designation, and the town was sort of on the way to our next stop, so even though we were already way behind schedule we figured it was worth a few minutes for the opportunity to stand at the exact center of the country.

That’s where Sam had his first victory of the day. At just about every stop on our trip he’s been getting one of those souvenir smushed pennies, but the penny smusher at the Center of the Nation Monument ate his coins and gave him nothing in return. We told the ladies in the visitors center, who had no idea how to fix the machine but one of them happened to have exactly the smushed penny Sam wanted in her desk and gave it to him.

It was a good note on which to leave South Dakota and head to our next stop, Devils Tower in northeastern Wyoming. Literally the moment we crossed the border the landscape changed from forests to cattle ranches. An hour later we pulled into the parking lot of our third National Monument in two days (and the nation’s very first National Monument, thanks to Teddy Roosevelt), a scientifically unexplained stone monolith 867 feet high. More exciting than the tower itself, though, was Sam’s discovery of a car with Hawaii plates in the parking lot. We got all 50! We spent the next several minutes wondering how one might drive from Hawaii to Wyoming but our thinking was interrupted when Sam noticed something else interesting: two climbers scaling Devils Tower.

Can’t see them? Hang on, let me zoom in a bit:

Still no? OK, let’s get closer:

There. There’s one guy on top of the ledge, and his partner is climbing up well beneath him. I don’t know how Sam spotted these guys from where we were standing.

After a quick lunch we argued briefly about the convertible roof. It had been a beautiful sunny morning and I wanted the top down. Sam insisted on leaving the roof closed. I gave in. Two minutes later we were hit with a monstrous sunshower so heavy I had to drive 40 in a 75. The kid was on fire.

Now that we were a whole lot drier than those climbers, we headed north out of Wyoming and into Montana, to the Little Bighorn Battlefield. Only took four hours. For the first time since our first long drive out of Cooperstown, Sam got bored in the car. He ended up pulling out the DVD player and watching the first half of “ET” before the setting sun caused glare issues. 

Eventually we made it to Little Bighorn, which bored Sam more than the drive. I had planned to drive the tour road, which has several stops with markers indicating battle sites, monuments, etc. He wanted to leave. We compromised on walking over to the Native American monument and then to the hill where Custer and his men had their Last Stand, and then heading out.

By the time we left Little Bighorn it was about 6:30 pm. I was originally hoping to see Pompey’s Pillar (a large rock near the Yellowstone River where William Clark carved his name and the date that is the only physical evidence of Lewis and Clark’s expedition), but it was over an hour away, we’d been in the car most of the day, and we hadn’t yet eaten dinner. I told Sam that Pompey’s Pillar would have to wait till morning. His response: “We can make it, Dad. Let’s do it.” I told him that going there would mean we wouldn’t eat until afterward. He was OK with that. I told him we might not make it there by the 8 pm closing time. He insisted that we would. So I asked the lady inside my GPS how to get there, she told me, and we went. We got there at 7:48, just enough time to get into the gates, speed through the exhibits, peep Clark’s graffiti autograph, walk in his footsteps, climb to the top of the rock, and then grill a late dinner at the nearby picnic tables.

Sam even noticed that the date Clark inscribed on the rock (July 25) is today’s date–by squeezing it in today we accidentally visited Clark’s handiwork exactly on the 205th anniversary of its carving. Everything worked perfectly until we were ready to make dinner, at which point we got swarmed by the same mosquitos Clark complained about in his journal and we had to flee to the saftey of the car.

New plan: we’ll find a place to spend the night and eat a cold dinner in our motel room. Sam is often easygoing, but not when it comes to food. This time, though, he continued rolling with the punches. Which was good because the punches kept coming. Turns out that the recent oil spill on the Yellowstone River has brought hundreds of extra people to the Billings area, filling every room in the hotels and motels in and around town for days on end. We drove up to hotel after hotel after hotel, only to be turned away every time. We eventually found a decent place for a semireasonable price but by the time we got into our room and sat down to eat it was 10 pm. Sam was clearly tired and desperately hungry, but his mood never soured. I was both impressed and appreciative, and told him so.

Meanwhile, thanks to his insistence on abridging our Little Bighorn visit and seeing Pompey’s Pillar today, we’re completely back on schedule and can sleep a bit later tomorrow before heading to Yellowstone Park, where I plan to reward Sam with a special (and early) dinner.

"I'm crushing your head!"

When you’ve seen something in pictures more times than you can count but never seen it in person, seeing it in person can be anticlimactic. The Hollywood sign, for example, was nice to see in person but I had seen it already in so many movies and TV shows that it didn’t feel new. Very few things can overcome that familiarity. The Statue of Liberty is one of them–so majestic in person that every time I see her it’s like I’m seeing her for the first time.

Mount Rushmore was somewhere in between. It was exciting to see the mountain/statue, partly because it’s so famous that it’s one of those things you know you have to see at some point in your life and partly because we’d seen license plates from 45 different states on our road trip and we knew there was a decent chance we’d find the last 3/5 in the parking lot (we saw two, leaving only Arkansas, Alaska, and Hawaii). But Mount Rushmore also looked just like it does in all the pictures, so it had a certain familiarity to it.

Rushmore is billed as a bastion of patriotism, but I’ve always thought of it as more of a marvel of large-scale sculpture and engineering than anything else. Sam, apparently, thought of it as a work of art and was entirely unimpressed with the engineering feat:

There’s a half-mile loop trail that gets you away from the huge crowds at the main viewing area and much closer to the mountain, providing new views from interesting angles. It was during that little hike that Rushmore really impressed us both. The busts look like the presidents from far away but we didn’t appreciate the level of detail until we got a closer look. Sam focused on the hair (“There’s so much detail in Teddy’s mustache!”);  I was particularly amazed by the eyes.

If Friday was a driving day with a little bit of sightseeing, Sunday was a sightseeing day where even the driving was part of the sightseeing. I think it’s fair to say that 90% of the interesting things to do and see in South Dakota are scattered in the Black Hills. That’s more of a compliment to the Black Hills than an insult to the rest of the state. the problem is that I was unaware of this concentration until a few weeks ago. So when I was first planning the trip and blocking out rough activities or areas for individual days, I alloted only one day for Rushmore and the Black Hills area. We easily could spend a week here, but at this point that’s not an option (especially since Sarah is meeting us in Seattle on Friday). So we tried to jam as much as we could into the one day we’ve got here, with the understanding that we may have to steal a bit of Monday from Montana.

From Mount Rushmore it’s a half-hour drive to the Crazy Horse monument, a Rushmore-like statue of the great Lakota leader on his horse that’s currently being carved into a mountain that dwarfs Rushmore. It’s been in the works for about 50 years already and is nowhere near completion, thanks to the immense scale of the project and the small workforce (it’s privately funded and thus most of the work is being done by the now-deceased sculptor’s grown kids). But his face was finished a few years ago and part of his arm and the vague outline of his horse’s head are visible, so with a bit of imagination you can see where this thing is headed.

More important, we saw license plates in the parking lot from Arkansas and Alaska, leaving us with only the entirely unrealistic Hawaii to find.

Up next: Jewel Cave, a mostly limestone cave full of crystals and interesting rock formations. Its status as the second longest cave in the world (154 miles and still “growing” thanks to continued exploration) has earned it National Monument status. The best parts were 1) when our extremely enthusiastic and ntertaining tour guide used The Hamster to demonstrate how the cave was discovered …

and 2) a 20-foot ribbon of reds, oranges, and white that looks so much like a giant piece of bacon sticking out of the cave wall that the scientific term for the formation is actually “cave bacon.”

From Jewel Cave we headed east to Custer State Park, where a road called Wildlife Loop took us winding through the natural habitats of several of the park’s animal inhabitants. You never know what you’ll see in any given spot on any given day, but we got pretty lucky. We saw white-tailed deer in several places …

… and a dozen or so of the park’s famously precocious burros, including this guy who wrongly assumed we had food for him …

… but what I really wanted to see was buffalo. There’s a herd of about 1,300 of them living in the park, and rangers at the entrance told us that a bunch had been spotted earlier in the day on the western part of the loop road. With only about a mile left of the road we had seen none, but then suddenly there they were! Maybe a couple hundred buffalo sitting, walking, drinking, and completely ignoring the several cars that had pulled over to watch them.

Like Rushmore, the buffalo looked just like in all the pictures we’ve seen but were much more impressive up close. Enormous, powerful, brutish, hairy, filthy, and yet regal. Or, if you ask Sam, cute. (“Is there anything more adorbale than a baby buffalo? How awesome would it be to have one? Dad, can I have a baby buffalo for my birthday?”)

Our next stop was not a stop at all but a scenic drive. Specifically, a the Peter Norbeck Scenic Byway, named one of the Top 10 Scenic Drives in the country. Winding roads through the Black Hills National Forest, hairpin turns, one-lane wooden bridges, gorgeous lakes, and, at one point, through the ponderosa pines a very distant view of Rushmore:

The drive was alternately thrilling, terrifying, and breathtakingly beautiful.

What better way to follow it up, then, than with a little gold digging? Literally. You can;t go to the Black Hills without trying to find at least a few specks of the gold that’s in them thar hills, so as we passed through the tiny town of Keystone we stopped in at the Big Thunder Gold Mine and did a bit of panning. This particular mine is a bit less touristy than some of the others in the area, and they take you to an actual creek with real equipment to do panning like the prospectors used to. Unfortunately, that takes four hours, so we had to settle for simpler panning in the creek-fed troughs they have right outside the mine.

We found a few tiny flakes before Sam insisted on doing some gem panning as well. That’s done by grabbing a big scoop of dirt and rocks, plopping it in a little basket with a screened bottom, sifting out the tiny stuff, and then trying to match each remaining rock to a chart showing several types of worthless gems. Being colorblind, I had neither the interest nor ability to do this, but Sam enjoyed this immensely.

By the time we left Big Thunder it was about 7:30 pm, and we still hadn’t eaten dinner or gotten to the last two places on our overly ambitious itinerary for the day. Deadwood and Belle Fourche could wait until Monday but our hunger couldn’t, so we stopped at the first picnic area we passed for yet another side-of-the-road cookout. This one had much nicer scenery than the others, though.

Bellies full, we headed toward Deadwood with a plan to crash at the first motel we found. This was not a good plan. We ended up at the Black Hills Inn & Suites, which sounds nice but looks … not nice, and smells … not nicer. This place is such an antiquated dive that they still have actual keys to the rooms (and shag carpeting, and the smell of the previous occupant’s coffee, and curtains that don’t quite cover the whole window …). But it’s got beds, and after a day like Sunday that’s what we needed most.

Picture a sheet of legal paper turned horizontally so that it’s in landscape orientation. That’s roughly the shape of South Dakota. Now draw a horizontal line going completely across this sheet of paper, about a third of the way up from the bottom. That’s more or less our route through South Dakota. It’s a little more than 400 miles. We drove most of that on Friday. And yet this is one of the most interesting places I’ve ever been.

With calamity behind us and Calamity Jane ahead of us, the goals for Friday were relatively simple. In order of descending importance: get to our Rapid City (most of the way across the state) before sundown, visit Badlands National Park, and break up the 7.5 hour drive to Rapid City a couple of times by finding things to stop and see along the way.

Our first two stops fulfilled the later goal. First came Sioux Falls–South Dakota’s most populous city and home to a three-tiered waterfall. I figured it would be a good stop because it was about an hour into our drive and because Sam and I are both endlessly fascinated by waterfalls. This one didn’t disappoint. the town itself is pretty ugly–it’s very industrial and we had to drive through the stockyard district to get to the falls–but the falls and the park surrounding them are beautiful.

Next up was a concert venue about an hour and a half further down I90. On the way there is about when the billboard started. Thousands of billboards, lined up one after another for hundreds of miles along I90. Some made political statements …

 … but most advertised tourist traps; we’d see dozens and dozens of billboard for some cheesy tourist destination, then we’d finally pass that destination, and the billboards would begin advertising some new cheesy destination. It was so abundant, so overdone, so ridiculous, that even the billboards for legitimate places kinda made me feel dirty.

Anyway, back to the Corn Palace. It’s like the Madison Square Garden of South Dakota–if Madison Square Garden were a lot smaller, located in a small town, and decorated inside and out with large murals made entirely of naturally colored corn cobs and husks. The murals follow a central theme and stay up for a year, at which point the murals are all changed for a new theme. (This year’s theme is “American Pride.”)

It’s actually quite impressive despite the gaudiness of the Taj Majal-like pointy domes atop the roof. Oh, had I not mentioned the pointy roof domes? Sorry, I assumed you knew.

Best yet, admission is free, guided tours are free, and we even got to meet the Palace’s anthropomorphic corn mascot, Cornelius.

Back on I90, we had a couple hundred miles to go before reaching Badlands National Park. Lucky for us we were entertained not merely by 8 bajillion more tacky billboards but by several odd sights that seemed to be placed along the highway for no real reason at all. Our favorites were a primary-color sculpture garden anchored by a large bull’s head …

… and a dinosaur skeleton being walked on a leash by a human skeleton.

South Dakota’s I90 is apparently the nation’s kitch capital.

Perhaps the best part of the drive, though, was when we passed a sign alerting us to the fact that we had crossed into the Moutain time zone, thus adding a full hour to our day. In seconds we went from slightly behind schedule to well ahead of schedule. I only wished that every day could include such a gift.

Eventually we reached the Badlands, which absolutely blew us both away. The landscape was like nothing either of us had ever seen, with freaky, moonscape rock structures surrounded by endless prairie.

This was my first National Park, and I was awed by the vastness of it, which I presume is common to National Parks but amazed me nonetheless. Aside from looking around at the park’s vast, unusual beauty, (which we did quite a bit of) there’s not much to do in the park. Hiking and camping are big there, but signs like these kept Sam and I on the paved pathways:

Hamsters and rattlesnakes are not good friends.

We ended the day with an hour’s drive to Rapid City, where we checked into a surprisingly perfect hotel called GrandStay. In-room kitchenette, indoor pool, outdoor basketball court, and, best of all, guest laundry room with automatic detergent injection. We spent Saturday making use of all these amenities, getting some much-needed time out of the car, discovering that the takeout food at the kosher counter of Minneapolis’s Byerly’s supermarket is not nearly as tasty as the takeout food we got back in Cleveland, and trying to figure out the best plan of attack to squeeze two or three days worth of interesting stuff in the Black Hills (the southwest corner of South Dakota) into one Sunday. That extra hour came in pretty handy Friday but I wish I could have saved it for Sunday.

For your sanity and mine, I’ll discuss Sunday in a separate post.