Blogs from Custer State Park, South Dakota, United States, North America

Tom and I are driving home through the prairie states of Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Indiana. We drove west through Canada’s prairie provinces: Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta. I told him today that though I love some of the things about the eastern US (I lived in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Tennessee), I’m a child of the prairies, having lived in Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana, and love to be where I can look across the wide spaces, see the whole sky, and breathe with the help of the constant wind. Middle America is not just “flyover” country to me. We’ve spent the last couple of days at Custer State Park in South Dakota. If you’ve never been there, it’s time to go. Tourist attractions range from watching real cowboys round up real buffalo (bison ... read more

We found a Methodist church in Sundance so we went to services this morning. The congregation was mostly elderly with only two young families. We talked with an elderly couple who have been ranchers in Sundance all of their lives. Its nice to get a local perspective. Sundance seems like a pretty nice town. Our destination for today was the Black Hills, a fairly short drive of a hundred miles. We have been there before and really like the area. We decided to camp somewhere convenient to Custer State Park, but I couldn't reserve a site in the park itself. After setting up camp we went into Custer State Park and poked around a couple areas. We saw lots of wildlife, including bison, pronghorns, deer, bighorn sheep, turkeys, and prairie dogs. We will go back again ... read more

Today we found we have another low tire so we put a hold on the site seeing to find a tire shop. We dropped the tire off at a local tire shop and went thrift shopping. We found the Twilight movie that Daisy read on this trip, a lot of cool t-shirts for Daisy and finally a new camera. We got to go to a sit down lunch at Perkins which was a nice treat. We then picked up Mandy and headed to Custer State Park, it was $20 to get into the park and was already 5 pm so we opted to drive thru and take our own scenic drive. It seems that this area follows its own set of rules, all the other South Dakota State Parks are $6 and none of the other ... read more

Day 10: 59 degrees and cloudy. We moved between Custer State Park and the Black Hills National Forest to do some wildlife viewing. We started with some prairie dogs, I spotted what I claim is a Golden Eagle but it could have been one of many raptors in the area, some red wing black birds, and a few other species of birds I am not familiar with. We caught some white tailed deer and prong horn deer, and of course...a herd of 200-300 bison. On the way home after dinner we spotted some moose but it was too dark to get decent pictures. However, the only viable proof I can present is the picture of two sets of eyes in the dark--see below. We did run up to Rapid City to catch a movie, Inside Out, ... read more

After nearly one year absence I’ve returned to share with you our travels and to keep the record of memories going for ourselves! Please feel free to ignore my entry reminders if you’d like or let me know and I’ll remove you from my “guestbook.” My last entry was of our East Coast trip last fall, 2010. We landed in Florida and a few weeks later drove the Element back to Michigan for Christmas. Thankfully our lab Harley is a great traveler so tolerates all this travel well (probably better than we do.) After a few weeks enjoying the kids, grands and friends we drove back to Florida. The winter consisted of a five week Habitat build in Fellsmere, Fl with our Care-A-Vanner reunion group. This group of friends is so special to us and we ... read more