Days Twelve & Thirteen: ALL DONE!

Just a few yards from our camp site at the Ranch, we almost stepped on a nest of baby duck. The nest was perfectly round and there were these six tiny, exquisite ducklings in there, as well as some broken shell. It was one of the most beautiful things we'd ever seen.

The morning at the Ranch was spent eating donuts, hiking around (we saw a badger!), and swimming in the snow-melt river. 

 Then we packed up for the drive home. On the way out, we stopped at the old ranch house, which has been basically abandoned. Inside, some things looked exactly the same:

Other things did not: 

It was eerie for Jennifer, but not as bad as she'd expected.

We enjoyed a wholesome lunch in Evanston

with some lime rickey sherbet for dessert

then pointed the Odyssey west. The drive was long, hot, boring, punctuated by a night in Winnemucca. But the fairly happy family eventually made it back to Mill Valley and they are all fairly happy to be home.

THE END

Day Eleven: The State Pen

He's a goof.

We drove from Casper to Rawlins, Wyoming with the intention of only stretching our legs at the old prison museum. 

But once inside, Jennifer could not be torn away. She was particularly fascinated by the story of Annie Bruce, an Evanston girl who allegedly put strychnine in her family's pie.

Jennifer and Owen signed on for the full prison tour, while Mark and Isabel went to lunch. The prison gave Isabel the major creeps, and rightly so. 

Among the lowlights of the tour: a cell in Block A

and the gas chamber.

It was altogether haunting and grotesque, but Jennifer and Owen thoroughly enjoyed it.

After that, we drove to the Reese family ranch just outside Evanston and partook of more wholesome activities, like playing in a stream

and roasting hot dogs.

We camped out and it was wonderful -- "This is the highlight of the trip!" said Isabel -- but for the dire mosquito situation.

Day Ten: Deadwood & Casper

This is the view from the Holiday Inn in Rapid City. We were sad to leave. We all had a little crush on Rapid City. 

To fortify himself for the long day of driving ahead, Owen demolished a diner breakfast:

 

And it was a VERY long drive. We made a brief stop in the humid hill town of Deadwood, South Dakota.

Here, Mark and Jennifer paid their respects at the graves of Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane, their interest rooted entirely in devotion to the defunct HBO series. 

After that, the day was all about white-knuckled driving. See that green thing on the seat next to Isabel?

 An antique smoking table that cost $84 at a Rapid City antiques store. What a find.

This is not a hospital, it is the Holiday Inn in Casper, Wyoming:

There were several hundred swallows nesting in the eaves, but inside it was gorgeous and luxurious. This was Jennifer and Isabel's favorite hotel of the entire trip. 

We liked downtown Casper, but not as much as Rapid City.

Day Nine: Pretty good day, Badlands

Flora in the Badlands.

Fauna in the Badlands.

Fairly happy family in the Badlands.

Boy in the Badlands.

Mother and child in the Badlands. 

Mark is the only one of us who passionately loves the Badlands, a region of parched, austere rock piles with scant vegetation and scary animals. The heat was that of a blast-furnace. After a brief foray into this forbidding land, Mark was the only one who wanted to explore further. There was a small quarrel, but it resolved itself with a minimum of shouting. He went to do some hiking and everyone else stayed at the Visitors' Center, where inside there was air-conditioning; outside, shade. We were all fairly, if not completely, happy with this outcome, which befits a fairly happy family.

When Mark returned from his hike, drenched with sweat, we went to Wall Drug, a shameless and amusing tourist trap in the town of Wall, South Dakota where we drank ice cream sodas, looked at Western clothing, bought a snow globe and some Dakota honey,etc.

We also took a "free" bumper sticker which now provides free advertising for Wall Drug on the back of our Odyssey.

Dinner: another bravura eating performance by Owen. He ordered the mac n' cheese off the kids' menu and when it arrived, stared at it aghast. He said:  "This is TINY! I'm EIGHT not TWO! I'm never ordering from the kids' menu again!"

He proceeded to eat the contents of his bowl of mac n' cheese in three minutes, moved on to Isabel's pasta with cream sauce, then Jennifer's baked potato. After reading Novella Carpenter's Farm City Jennifer was thinking she wanted to get a couple of pigs to eat all their kitchen scraps, but now realizes she doesn't need one.

Today we head back west and will (we think) be camping. So there may be no post for a day or two. 

Day Eight: Black Hills

Now we've all seen Mt. Rushmore (Mark has seen it twice) and can check it off our lists forever. The place was overrun, smelled a little like a latrine, and reminded Jennifer of the Washington Mall during Spring Break. 

This was the low point of our otherwise fine day in South Dakota. 

Rapid City: pleasant town, distinguished by bronze statues of all the presidents on its street corners. 

That's Jimmy Carter. 

 

The Black Hills: not black, but densely forested and dark green. The Lakota Indians thought they looked black from a distance hence the name. The fact that they are not black was a little bit disappointing to some of us. Also, they are populous and filled with junk shops, sort of like the Santa Cruz of South Dakota.

We had some fun experiences anyway. 

The kids had their first Dairy Queen soft-serve cones.

 

Owen: It made me feel sick.

We went to a shop selling antlers, furs, and purses made from buffalo scrotums (yes! and very ugly.) Owen became fixated on acquiring a turtle shell. Unlike Isabel, whose wants are few and elegant, Owen's wants are many and bizarre. He wanted an arrowhead and beads, gems and some antlers, but mostly he wanted a turtle shell.

Mark: Wouldn't you rather have a live turtle or tortoise?

Owen: Of course, but I love turtles and the shell makes me think of turtles.

Mark: You know they didn't just find the shell. They probably had to kill the turtle.

Owen: I know, but keeping the shell honors turtles.

Honors turtles? 

Jennifer wanted to get a buffalo skull and horns to put on the hen house, but Isabel nixed that: "We don't want our house to look like a junkyard."

The girl has good taste and sound judgment.

We didn't buy anything from that shop, but we did buy some stones at a place down the road stones we will use in the garden.

Then we went on a tour of Jewel Cave and spent almost two hours a few hundred feet underground. It was cold and wet.

Isabel: I liked the temperature. It was the perfect temperature.

Owen: I didn't really like that cave.

We had dinner at a Rapid City brew pub. Owen was uncharacteristically silent through the entire meal because he was drawing characters from Garfield as carved into the side of a mountain. 

Day Seven: On the road again

We left Yellowstone for South Dakota mid-morning. "Wyoming is so pretty, why don't more people live here?" Isabel asked. 

The answer would be obvious in January, but the state is irresistible in June.

All day we drove across Wyoming. Big state. In Sheridan we stopped and bought snacks. Jennifer finally found local honey, or honey that was labeled "local." 

We got to Devil's Tower, famous from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, around dusk. 

It is one impressive rock.

 

Isabel was too alarmed by the rattlesnake warnings to take the hike around the base of the Tower. 

Mark: A rattlesnake isn't going to bother you if you don't bother it.

Isabel: I'm not worried about being hurt by a snake, I'm worried about SEEING one. 

So she and Jennifer sat on a bench while Mark and Owen did the circle. Here, Jennifer and Isabel learned that one of their chickens back in Mill Valley had died. They decided to wait to break the news to Owen, as he is deeply attached to the chickens and will be unable to enjoy the rest of the trip once he finds out.

After we left the tower, it was a white-knuckle drive through the dark to Rapid City. We stopped briefly for dinner at a diner, where Owen ate two giant pancakes drenched in syrup, some fried egg on toast, leftover pasta from Mark's plate, and Jennifer's french fries. 

Day Six: The best day of our trip. We think.

More Yellowstone. Weather: finally beautiful. Kids: finally amicable. Cabin: still kind of gross.

We took a hike and saw two wolves who looked cruel, furtive, and determined. We saw an antelope, who looked slim, stupid, and nervous. We really wanted to see a bear, but didn't. We saw some newly gnawed bones

 and pretty flowers

and Owen talked the whole time about the personalities and quirks of our chickens, and what size, sex, and hair-length of dog he would prefer if he ever gets a dog. 

Hike was followed by a visit to Mammoth Hot Springs, which Jennifer found more haunting and beautiful than Old Faithful.

Owen declined to get out of the car, having seen enough hot water.

Later we went back to the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone to get a close-up view of the falls just before they plunge hundreds of feet from the cliff. 

We are not photographers, but trust us: none of us will forget this tremendous, terrifying sight or ungodly roar.

Dinner, as ever in Yellowstone, was grim. 

Like eating in a hospital.