Into the Wild

Well I'm currently sitting in a Starbucks in Rapid City, South Dakota after going to visit Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse this morning and spending the last two hours searching for and finding Rapid City's niceist car repair man (nothing major). More on this later.

I appologize for the relative dearth of posts. Apparently places with internet aren't nearly as ubiquitous as on the east coast. So I'll give a short summary of what has happened and talk about some of the cooler parts...

I had an awesome weekend in Kansas with Lauren and Sean. On Saturday Lauren and I drove out to Topeka to see Sean. We had a nice relaxing day just chilling out and then we went to Manhattan for dinner and a party. It was nice not to have to drive and to spend some time with company.

On Sunday we drove back from Topeka and early in the afternoon I left to head north to Vermillion, South Dakota. I passed through Iowa and Nebraska and even got to see Omaha from a distance (Kamaal received an honory phone call). I had dinner with one of my parents' old friends in Vermillion, South Dakota. I spend the night in Vermillion and left the next morning to head to Badlands National Park, which despite still being in South Dakota was a good 400 miles away. I made it to the Badlands early in the afternoon, owing to the nice benefit of crossing into the Mountain Time Zone.

For those of you who have never heard of the Badlands, they aren't nearly as bad as they sound. If anyone has seen the opening of Jurassic Park, the scene where Dr. Grant is digging up the velociraptor occurs in the Badlands. It's a very barren landscape with lots of rocks and very rugged grasses. However, it is also very beautiful as I'm sure you can see from some of my pictures.

After spending most of the afternoon hiking some small trails, I decided not to spend the night in the park's campground. Instead, you're allowed to spend the night in the backcountry as long as you are half a mile off of any road and out of view. I hiked back one of the longer trails for about an hour and set up camp just as the sun was setting. Let me just say that it was amazingly quiet and amazingly dark out there. I could see more stars than I've ever seen before in my life. I could also hear even the smallest sounds. It was like being in a sensory void. It was a little unnerving, but also exhilarating knowing that the nearest human being was over 10 miles away. It's something I probably won't do again in the immediate future, but it was nice to have the experience.

I woke up early this morning and hiked the hour back out to the road, civilization, and my car. I got to watch the sun come up as I was hiking and I hope you won't mind that I didn't take as many pictures this morning as I was truly enjoying the moment. I hope you each have a chance to experience something like this at some point in your lives.

After getting back to my car I took off and drove the 80 or so miles to Mount Rushmore, which surprisingly is pretty far of I-90 in the Black Hills. It was cool to see, but there wasn't much to do and I didn't spend more than 15 minutes there. Since I'm such a stickler for political correctness I also went to see the Crazy Horse Memorial to the American Indians. It was like Mount Rushmore on steriods. Again it was cool to see, but not much to do.

After leaving the Black Hills behind I came back to Rapid City to get my car's power outlet fixed. For about three days I have had problems with it shorting out and I kept having to put new fuses into the fuse box under my steering column. Eventually though the fuses started burning out immediately after I would start my car and my power port wouldn't work at all. After trying five different places in Rapid City, I found a very nice gentleman that helped me take the front of my center console and fix the power port. He didn't even charge me anything. I was very fortunate to find such a nice person to help me fix my car as he could have easily charged me for the half hour that we spent fixing my power port.

Alrighty well that brings this post to close. I'm now going to get back on the highway and drive the 700 or so miles to Yellowstone. Hopefully I'll get there later tonight. Enjoy the many pictures.