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.