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Published: September 10th 2011
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Today we had a trip out to the Badlands National Park (we decided not to spend hours driving right through South Dakota due to the vast areas of praries and Abi’s wise words!). We travelled down to Wall and visited the Minuteman nuclear missle launching base thing on the way – you could look down into the silo and still see the practise missile, a tad disconcerting but getting in through the fence with the violators will be subject to the use of deadly force sign brought back memories of my Greenham Common days!
We then drove into Wall – again a great little wild west park your car along main street type place with lots of interesting shoppes, photographic displays etc, spent a while there and then drove onto the Badlands National Park. I had read that the scenery was very unreal and martian like so I am not sure what I expected but we spotted the first scenic overlook and pulled in.
From the roadside it looked like it wouldn’t be much but when you walked to the view point the sides just fell away, there was the most unusual rock formations, jagged peaks, gullies, turrets and
prarie then going on forever till hitting another mountain range of jagged edges. The sky was so clear and blue the silhouettes of the ranges were astounding.
The whole area is full of tall peaks and plunging canyons and gullies, with strange pyramid type rock shapes out on the plains and the colours are amazing, reds, pinks, browns, creams and striations going through the rock forming distinct bands of colours that follow on for miles.
Once again the sheer size and scale of the area is impossible to capture on a photo, even when you are there you do not realise how vast everything is, your eyes make things appear closer or drops seem not so bad when really they are immense! An incredible unusual and must visit place!
Spent our last night in Deadwood, we have really enjoyed staying here and it has been a great base for day trips out. We stayed at the Super 8 Motel, we have stayed in a few of them before and they have been great, Deadwood’s one is their flagship one! When we arrived we were given vouchers for free drinks while playing in the casino – I use
that term loosely - it was a slot machine arcade, but there was another voucher which if you played the slots for an hour you got a free pizza, what a bargin! We had tea there two night’s running lol, it cost us about $6 dollars for a whole evenings’ entertainment and we had free beer and diet coke the whole time and then I had a pizza and Howard had too much beer to eat anything other than a dozen doughnuts (freshly made of course). There was an indoor pool and a sun terrace overlooking the creek, the rooms were really comfortable and so I was quite sorry to leave.
As we drove off this morning (9th) I was singing take me back to the Black Hills the Black Hills of Dakota and I kind of mean’t it, it’s been great but it’s time to move on. We are heading south today on to Fort Collins, we are making our way down to the canyon lands but it is such a vast distance we are breaking it up into 3 legs, so it’s going to be long long drives and not a lot else I suspect for the
next 3 days.
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