Badlands: Getting There

Badlands National Park
Distance: 1,280 miles
Drive Time: 20 hours

The Parks are getting further and further away. At this point, there are very few parks under 1,000 miles from our house, so from here on out, two travel days will be necessary to reach our destination. For this trip, I asked Matthew which park he would like to visit, and he picked Badlands National Park & Mount Rushmore. To get there, we must travel to the far western end of South Dakota. It would be a long journey, but well worth it to see the beautiful rolling hills and amazing wildlife of South Dakota. On the way home, we decided to break up our trip with a short visit to the Capital of Missouri: Jefferson City.

The official website is always our starting point for going to national parks, and this one helps give a good idea of what to expect. The Badlands are amazing formations that seem to pop out of the flat prairie where nothing grows. There were plenty of trails, so we decided that of our week vacation, we would spend two days in the badlands. The rest would be spent on the other side of Rapid City in the Black Hills.

For the first day of traveling, we had no time to stop, as we made our way to Omaha, NE. It was a 12 & 1/2 hour trip, and while we started out at 6:00 am, we didn't arrive until around 9:00pm. But we did learn something along the way. Our favorite place to eat dinner on the road is Taco Bell, not only is it fast and cheap, but everybody likes Tex-Mex. We arrived in Kansas City a little early to eat dinner, so we decided to get an hour or so north before eating. On the out-skirts of Kansas City we saw a Taco Bell and considered stopping, but since it was early, we decided to wait for the next one. That was a big mistake. Not only was there no Taco Bell after that, there wasn't anything. We drove for over an hour on I-29, with (as Stacy said) our standards rapidly falling. We started with maybe 2 or 3 places that we would stop at. Finally, we arrived at Rock Port, MO and saw a sign for McDonald's. We stopped only to see it strangely closed (on our return trip it was opened like normal). The town of Rock Port is slightly off the interstate, but we were starving and decided to risk going into town. Once there we found exactly one place to stop, Casey's General Store. This is one of the more common gas stations in the Mid-West. But they do serve pork sliders and pork tenderloin sandwiches. We pulled in and cleared out everything that we in the ready-to-go area. It was not great food at all, and there wasn't enough. Poor Matthew left hungry, even eating some of Stacy's salad. The pork tenderloin was awful. But at least we had some food and were ready to get rolling down the road to Omaha.

Everyone was tired, and when we pulled in to Comfort Suites of West Omaha, we went straight to bed. Comfort Suites was a good hotel room though, it had the normal room of 2 beds and a pullout couch for the kids, but then it had another small adjoining room with a bed for us. It was crowded, but since we were only spending the night, it worked out perfectly. Omaha NE is a large city, with a metropolitan area population of about 1 million people. But perhaps due to being more spread out than other cities, it didn't feel that large. Maybe at 8:00pm, most people are home and off the freeways. Either way, it was a pleasant drive through the middle of the largest city of Nebraska.

The next morning we took a detour to Mitchell, South Dakota and the famous Corn Palace. The detour took us off the interstate and through the back country of Nebraska and South Dakota, going through small town after small town (average population: 500) interspersed through vast expanses of farmland. These, however, were not your flat farms on Kansas or western Ohio. These farms were on rolling hills, keeping the trip visually interesting as we made our way to South Dakota.

My coworker, Sean Kilgallin, insisted that we stop at the Corn Palace in Mitchell. He didn't really explain why or even tell us what we should expect. But given this was our shortest day of driving, we decided we had time to stop and see what all the fuss was about. The short story is that in 1892, Mitchell wanted to showcase how good the land was for growing corn, and they decided to do it in spectacular fashion by creating a palace made purely out of corn. Just kidding. It wasn't that loony. Instead, they have murals throughout the building (inside & out) that are made out of corn. Every year, they pull down the old mural and put up a new one -- a process that takes 4-6 months. Inside is a Basketball arena, convention stage , and concession stand. The last one being the most important, since we arrived at noon with everybody very hungry. After the quick tour, we got back on the road to Rapid City.

Another thing I learned while driving the interstate of South Dakota, the speed limit is 80 mph, with very little traffic. We were able to zoom through the entire state in record time, with one small hitch. It is also incredibly windy, and at 80 mph, the wind wants to push the big van off the road. This is especially true when you pass a semi-truck, and get hit with it hard as soon as you get past the wind block. As we got close to our destination, we had a slight detour as the road next to our VRBO was closed. This meant an extra 5 minutes of any day that we wanted to travel east. Amazingly, they opened the road the day we wanted to go home. We arrived late that evening to a great VRBO on the eastern outskirts of Rapid City. We quickly unpacked and went to bed, ready for a great week.