wellswriting

Back to Life August 31, 2012

To some it may have seemed that I had disappeared from the world. My last entry here on August 4th was the last time I had the luxury of time.  And for the past three weeks I have been working non-stop fourteen hours and more a day trying to get two new school projects approved by the Division of the State Architect (DSA). State government seldom works on logic and my August 31st deadline to have these projects approved or loose bond funding for them is a prime example.  To achieve this however, I have worked nights and weekends ceaselessly to put together the plans and the details that could be approved by reviewers for seismic, fire, and life safety, standards and to ensure the projects are fully accessible.

There is a mind-boggling amount of detail that must go into the plans for school projects like these two. Our project teams had mechanical, electrical, structural, and civil engineers along with a landscape architect, sound attenuation consultants, soils engineers and more all coordinated through me as the project architect.  The plans for one of the projects is 250 sheets, which measures over an inch thick of 24 inch by 36 inch paper.

To my wife and kids, I have been like  a casual acquaintance who has come to visit in the evenings.  My wife has had to pick up the responsibilities of making sure the kids start their school year off right. She brought me lunches at my desk. She even had to drive down to work on a Sunday night to bring me some changes of clothes for my travels because I was too busy scrambling to even have time to go home for that. She also only got a midnight exchange of gifts from me on our 19th wedding anniversary last week.

All of this effort culminated this week with a marathon review of the projects at the DSA Oakland and San Diego offices where we poured over the plans for ten hours a day with the reviewers.  We checked to see that every connection was secure. We checked to see that every fire regulation was followed. We checked to see that people in wheel chairs, the blind and the deaf could get around everywhere in the facility.  Even a walk in freezer had to have the interior clear area for a wheelchair to maneuver in.  In the end, both projects were approved and my deadline was met with one day to spare.

I had a luxurious six hours of sleep last night and I get to stay home all weekend with my wife and kids for the first time in nearly month.  And in a couple of years, I will get to go walk the halls of some brand spanking new school buildings that I can take satisfaction in having been a part of bringing to life.

6-29 August 4, 2012

I was back to writing my fiction yesterday. It is a short story that I had hoped to enter in the second quarter of the Writers of the Future contest but couldn’t complete on time. My stand in entry for that quarter written a couple of years before was form rejected. I had hoped to finish this story for the third quarter before work madness set in and didn’t even alow me the time to submit an older story. But I have started again on the story I really believe could have much promise. When I went to update the back-up though, I was surprised to see tat June 29th was the last time I wrote creatively. Where did the month of July go? Oh well, no time to worry about the lost time. This new story is a fresh concept that will hopefully grab the attention of judges who are tired of space battles and mythical creatures.

Reading Surpasses The DVD For The Kids July 31, 2012

I was putting away some of the gadgets we took with us on our big family road trip when I came upon the portable DVD player that I had packed with us.  I have used the player to entertain the kids with on long road trips in the past.  This time around, I didn’t have time to set it up ahead of the trip and there always seemed to be one reason or another to not set it up on the road.  While my 9-year-old son did ask for it a couple of times, he didn’t really miss it.  I downloaded books for him to my Kindle and his sister had her own books to read.  So when the monotony of the midwest prairie land got to them, my kids turned to their reading.  Aside from one morning of TV time while visiting family in Montana, our kids went without TV for nearly two weeks, and they survived.

Not only that, they thrived.

Road Trip Days 9-11 June 22, 2012

Days 9 & 10, Sunday June 3rd & Monday June 4th
Drove as far as Big Sky, Montana

It rained again.  A lot of rain. Considering that we were 10 or 15 miles down a dirt road, the rain was a concern.  Our drive out took us on down a very muddy and wet road that can make ten thousand pounds of camper seem like much more.  The kids thought is was great fun, but my wife and I were equally relieved to reach the interstate again.

We were headed for a spot on the map called Big Sky.  My wife’s aunt and uncle had recently moved to Big Sky from Arizona.  As you might guess, Big Sky Montana is about as different from Arizona as it gets.  They are retiring to this best kept secret of the ski-set.  One of the resorts on the surrounding mountains boasts at having the most developed ski runs of any other single resort in the USA. The population swells with entertainment stars, computer magnates and other ski loving wealthy snow worshipers.  We were here after that season and that suited us just fine.  We stayed relatively still for two days and two nights.  The kids got to sleep inside our host’s house while we had the camper to ourselves.  Their home backs onto a dedicated open meadow and we did a campfire in their backyard complete with smores and good stories.

In nearby Bozeman we visited their Natural History museum which includes a very extensive pre-historic fossil collection.  The next day we went horseback riding and some caught a glimpse of a grizzly bear.  Big Sky is a beautiful corner of our country and we loved our stay there, but soon we were on the move again.

Day 11, Tuesday, June 5th
Drove as far as Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming.

We followed our hosts from Big Sky to the West Entrance of Yellowstone on Tuesday.  Before going into the park they took us through the Montana Grizzly and Wolf Reserve.  This is one of the places bears, wolves and other wildlife go when they have been injured or captured for becoming a danger.  It was fun to watch the Grizzly Bears wrestle with each other.  I was reminded I was in Montana when I noticed a young man striding around with a gun holstered at his side like we were in the old west.

We said our goodbyes and ventured into Yellowstone.  Our first stop was at the Steamboat Geyser Basin.  Here we picked up another set of Junior Ranger workbooks (which are in a larger newspaper format).  Right away we saw that one of the ranger programs required to get the official Yellowstone Junior Ranger Patch was about to start so the kids and I boogied down the boardwalk trails to the Steamboat Geyser where a very engaging ranger gave a crash course lesson on the geology of Yellowstone and the way the different geysers operate.

Afterwards we set out on the shorter of two trails around the geyser basin, or so we thought.  The boardwalk that was at the start of the two trails away from Steamboat Geyser had recently been rebuilt along a route that differed from the map we were following.  The shorter trail we were supposed to take was not clearly marked from the new intersection and it looked like a path to see a different angle of the hot spring where the trials diverged.  As a result we ended up on the longer path.

This wasn’t so bad because Yellowstone is a place of wonder and there was plenty to see.  But Yellowstone is also a place where you never want to be caught unprepared on the longer trails in good weather.  Our whole trip this far had been a lesson in changing weather and sure enough, halfway down the three-mile path a mixture of light rain and snow began to lightly fall.  Thankfully the worst of it held off until we finished our hike and got back into the truck.
If there is one National Park in America that everyone should make it a priority to visit, it has to be Yellowstone.  The original trappers who first returned from the area told of the incredible sites, but as you might guess, they couldn’t be believed at first.  I could write volumes about the sites and wonders of Yellowstone, but to keep this narrative moving to an end let me just say, go and see it for yourself if you have never been there because volumes of words could never replace the experience of the place.
There is a grand loop drive around the park and on Tuesday we completed half of the loop before turning into a quickly filling campground.  The campground is at the 7,000 foot elevation and it was cold and late.  We drove in and set up the camper for the night.

Road Trip Day 8 June 14, 2012

Day 8, Saturday June 2nd
Drove as far as Gallatin National Forest, Montana

I have now personally looked all around Devil’s Tower in Wyoming and I can see no evidence of a box canyon where the government could set up a landing strip for aliens.  For those who don’t understand the reference rent or buy, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, on DVD and you will understand.  I do enjoy seeing the nation’s first National Monument every time I’m in the area.  As a boy I was a Y-Indian Guide (a pre-Cub Scout father/son activity). At the impressionable age of seven or eight I was told the story of an Indian brother and sister who were being chased by a giant bear.  The children climbed up on top of a tall slender mesa and the bear came after them.  They prayed to the Creator who sent an eagle down to lift the mesa up away from the bear.  The bear clawed at the sides of the mesa, but couldn’t reach the children and he went away.  The eagle returned the children to the ground when it was safe and Devil’s Tower is what remains of this event.  I did not see the Close Encounters box canyon, but I can see the claw marks on the sides of Devil’s Tower so you judge which story was true and what story was not.

From Devil’s Tower we crossed Wyoming into Montana and got pelted by the nastiest thunderstorm we had crossed yet.  The rain drove sideways across our truck and with a high profile camper on the back, the safest speed I could travel was 35 mph on a 75 mph freeway.  It was dark at full noon and the lightning was spectacular. We were headed for Little Bighorn and we feared we wouldn’t get to see much there, but just as we got near we drove out of the rain cell and into clearer skies.

On the banks of the Little Bighorn River, General Custer and the U.S. Calvary did everything wrong while the Native American warriors gathered there that day did everything right.  I had watched history shows and read accounts of what happened at the Little Bighorn and never fully understood the gravity of what happened until I visited this place.

White markers are placed where the Calvary soldiers were killed and red markers memorialize where the native people were killed.  The red markers are not as numerous as they should be because the peace that would allow the combatants to simultaneously honor both sacrifices at the battle did not exist until now, so the deaths of all of the native warriors are not fully documented. But you can still see evidence of all of the places of the battle that would forever change the west. The warriors won a great battle and much respect from the overly confident Calvary. That respect though, fostered a renewed effort to defeat the tribesmen. The Calvary which had been defeated and failed to drive the tribesman off of this part of the land and onto reservations did so in vein.  Today that region is a very large Crow and Cheyenne territory.  If reason had existed in Custer’s time, the Calvary would have been there to help establish this territory as native land peacefully.

In a modern truck and camper, we could cross these vast lands in a matter of days.  We have driven the route of the early European settlers and crossed the lands of the first Americans.  Out here the politics of Washington D.C. and the dysfunctional government of my home state do not seem to exist anymore.

After spending time at the Little Bighorn, we drove up west past Billings where we hit more hard driving thunderstorms.  It was a comfort to have Internet access via smart phones so we could confirm that these cells were not expected to turn into tornadoes.  After pushing past these, we made our way to the Gallatin National Forest at the base of the Beartooth Mountains in Montana.  Our AAA and Rand McNally maps said there was camping available on some roads marked in gray, meaning dirt roads.  Those maps have no way of conveying how hard it would be to tell which of the dirt roads and ranch driveways in the areas were the ones depicted on the simplified maps.  This was one of those places where a GPS excels. Those maps marked roads that clearly went from point A to point B and we could figure out the road to try from the only one shown on the GPS that went through to the same points.
But that didn’t make going down the road feel much better.  We were crossing Montana ranch land on a dirt road that looked like it was there to serve the ranches only.  For miles while dashing down the deserted gravel road, there were no signs or other reassurances that we were heading to a campground or public land.  It wasn’t until the nearly halfway point on the road that we finally saw a National Forest sign pointing our way down another road.  But that start too took us past more ranches and the only other vehicle we ever saw that afternoon was a rancher on a quad.  It wasn’t until right at the end of the road that the National Forest boundary became clearly marked and a campground was thankfully found.  After all of this, and with the terrible weather starting out the weekend, we were amazed to get out here and find other campers already there.  It was a bit of a roller coaster relief finding campers here.
It was a relief to know that we hadn’t stumbled into a long forgotten campground that the local ranchers living on the borders of would resent our intrusion.  As we drove though the campground looking for a suitable site, we became wary of the other campers.  They were all dressed in camouflage clothing and we began to fear these were hunters who would be running around shooting at everything that moved.  Many of the unoccupied campsites were so neglected and overgrown that it was hard to tell where we could park for the night.  As we slowly drove through we began to notice that the camouflaged campers had little camouflaged children with them.  These were Montana families dressed in Montana rustic outdoor gear.  None had guns that we could see and it looked more like they were here for the fishing in the swelling river adjacent to the campground.  We found a suitable site and backed in and set up for the night.  It wasn’t long before the first group of quad-cycles went by.  Now we wondered if these were joy riders that would be terrorizing the campground roads.  No, they were moms with small children in their laps taking themselves to the nearest toilets (which were located far from most campsites).  The rain moved in again and we hunkered down in our camper for the night playing cards and having ice cream sandwiches until bedtime.  It had been an adventure just finding this place, but it turned out to be a quiet comfortable place to stay the night.

Road Trip: Day 6 & 7 June 10, 2012

Day 6, Thursday May 31st

Drove as far as Mount Rushmore, South Dakota

Camping the night before at Wind Cave National Park in South Dakota was our first chance to have a campfire.  So of course we had smores (marshmallows roasted on the fire and put between graham crackers with a hunk of chocolate).  The kids also filled out as much of their Wind Cave Junior Ranger booklets as possible at the camp.  This made it easier to complete the program after our tour in the morning.  It was cold outside, but the kids had fun. We took the first tour of Wind Cave in the morning.  Wind cave is a very long natural cave, but the water that does make it into the cave does not go through the minerals that are needed to leave stalactites behind.  The kids finished their Junior Ranger booklets and got their second Junior Ranger badge of the trip. 

In the Black Hills of South Dakota, it is a relatively short drive from Wind Cave to Mount Rushmore.  The most common route would be up Interstate 315.  But we don’t typically go the interstate route so we elected to take State Highway 87 instead.  This took us up through Custer State Park where we saw lots of bison.  The traffic on 87 was light and RV’s were almost non-existent.  Something we should have wondered more about.  But we were enjoying the scenery and the  bison herds with lots of playful bison calves.  It wasn’t until we had gone an hour up the road before we learned why RV’s do not travel it.  A sign warned us that there were tunnels ahead with a clearance as low as 12 feet two inches.  With a car carrier on top of the camper, our vehicle is 12 feet 6 inches tall.  We either needed to be shorter or face driving an hour back down the road and then an hour back up 315.  My solution was to open the carrier and split the contents among the open halves.  This lowered our clearance to below 12 feet. The tunnels are roughly drilled through solid granite and they were positioned so that you see the Mount Rushmore carvings as you drive though them.  We were glad to have gone through the trouble to get through them.

We were at Mount Rushmore five years ago.  We saw the memorial for about ten minutes before fog rolled in and hid the memorial for the rest of our three hour lingering there that day.  The presidents didn’t hide this time and we got a good long look at the memorial, but we were getting tired from the cave tour and from climbing up and down on the truck to shift the contents to fit the tunnels.  We found a campsite and set up for the day at around 2 PM.  The kids played in a creek over the afternoon and I cleared the memory chips on the cameras.

Day 7, Friday June 1st

Drove as far as Devil’s Tower, Wyoming.

Our second night in South Dakota marked the first time we stayed in the same state for a full day.  We went back to Mount Rushmore in the morning for sunrise views of the memorial and to finish out the kid’s Junior Ranger booklets.  They received their third Junior Ranger badges and we hit the road.  Mount Rushmore had been our most eastern target for the trip up until the last day before leaving home.  That was when I happened across the television show, The Most Extreme Roadside Attractions, on the Travel Channel.  They featured a place called Wall Drug in South Dakota that had unusual things for sale and exhibits that included a six foot jack-a-lope and robotic life sized T-Rex robot.  My nine year old was hooked. 

In the past six days we had seen dinosaur bones buried in the ground and spectacular caves. We had driven up above the tree line and had been snowed on.  We traveled in the footsteps of the early pioneers, but my nine year old had continued to talk about seeing Wall Drug.  He wanted a chocolate-brown cowboy hat from Wall Drug and only from Wall Drug.  Our next destination now was Wall Drug.  Part of what made Wall Drug famous was the highway signs posted up to fifty miles away from the destination.  We traveled our first interstate to get there. The first question my boy asked when we turned onto the interstate was, “how close are we?” Just as he asked us we passed our first Wall Drug sign that read, “Pretty Near.” For the next 30 miles or so he dutifully read every Wall Drug sign informing us about the cold ice water, cold beer, donuts, T-Rex and more.

With all of this, you can build up some pretty big expectations for Wall Drug.  If you go there expecting to see things you have not seen before, you may be disappointed.  If you go there expecting to see an eclectic offering of things for sale coupled with homespun attempts at Disney style animatronics, then you will have fun.  My boy got his cowboy hat and cowboy boots and something Californians no longer knew existed.  He was able to buy a cap-gun that was not entirely safety orange.  For those who do not know this, California has taken the nanny state to the extreme that any and all cap guns must be bright orange and fluorescent green and they are not allowed to have a speck of coloring otherwise.  I have countless friends and family who managed to live through our formative childhood years without every causing harm with our realistic gun replicas, so throwing caution to the wind; I purchased a flintlock replica to complete the cowboy image.

That afternoon we traveled though the South Dakota Badlands and circled back up Interstate 90 into Wyoming.  We made it to Devil’s Tower, the nation’s first National Monument an hour before the visitor center closed, which gave us the chance to pick up another Junior Ranger booklet before going to the campground.  My son was the most popular boy in the playground that night with his cowboy hat and cap-gun.

The Classic American Road Trip: Days 1 through 5 June 4, 2012

My family and I struck out on the Classic American road trip starting on Saturday, May 25th.  It is something we’ve done several times before going out into the American west with a rough route in mind, but with no specific agenda.  Most of my time has been spent driving and seeing the sights with the family.  But I have also taken the time to write down a mini journal of what we’ve seen along the way.  Here are the first five days I jotted down.

Saturday May 26th.
Drove as far as Cave Creek, Nevada.

We started out on a typical route up Highway 50 over Echo Summit  to Tahoe.  What we did not expect to see up at the summit was snow, lots of snow.  It even snowed a little on us as we crested the summit and drove down into Tahoe.  Typically, the Sierras compress the weather as it goes over their peaks, so we then expected that to be the last of the snow.  We were wrong.  As we followed 50 around the lake, we climbed up the Eastern Nevada range headed for Carson City.  On that drive it was not only snowing more, it was sticking to the highway.  One zippy little car that had passed us not long before spun out.  We slowed down and passed and then came upon the scene where some cars encountered the side of an RV.

Our truck has 4WD and with the off-road tires, we were in control, but I worried about all of the compact cars around us with nothing more than street tires and unprepared drivers between their control and the side of our camper.  But we made it off the mountain and into Carson City without further incident, and the snow cleared so we thought we had seen the last of that.

Wrong.

Highway 50 in Nevada is known as the loneliest highway in the USA.  It felt like it on Saturday.  Adding to the surprising lack of traffic was snow again on the summits and in the valleys with a definite winter wonderland feel.  Only one week from June, we were changing from shorts into pants and from sandals to shoes.  Our next stop was in the little town of Austin where we wanted to refuel.  There was snow here too, and to our surprise, the power was out when we arrived.  There were people who had stopped at the remote place for the gas they needed at 9:AM. It was 1:30 when we arrived and thankfully the power was restored within 15 minutes so our delay was minimal.  We headed out and drove the remaining distance to Cave Creek, Nevada where we camped for the night.

There was no snow there when we stopped, but as you might guess, it didn’t take long before fluffy white flakes began to drift from the sky.  Chad and Natalie got to run around a bit in the falling snow before Chad’s boy-ness kicked in and he started getting muddy.  We retreated to our nice warm camper and eventually fell asleep.

Sunday May 27, 2012
Drove as far as Ashley National Forest, Utah

Started out with a light dusting of snow on the ground at Cave Creek Nevada.  We headed out to Great Basin National Park where we visited the Lehman Cave.  This is a two mile long cave with some of the best examples of all cave formations including stalagmites, stalactites, draperies, cave bacon, cave popcorn and some rarely found formations such as cave shields and cave turnips.  The kids loved it of course, but what’s not to love?  We ate lunch there and then struck out of Nevada and headed into Utah.

We saw more snow, but not nearly as much.  Utah doesn’t have the long lonely highways like Nevada and Utah speed limits are much slower.  We aimed for the back roads and avoided the interstates like they were the plaque.  We found a little place down a bumpy dirt road just off the highway in the Ashley National Forest where we made camp by a little stream.  There is a little fire pit and someone calling himself Kohl camped here in 82 and 84 (or so he felt compelled to document on a the birch trees growing here.  We stayed there for the night before aiming for the Dinosaur National Monument on the Northern Utah/Colorado border.  I do not feel compelled to document our stay on the trees like Kohl felt compelled to.

Monday May 28, 2012
Drove as far as Kremling, Colorado

Started out from our remote campsite and drove to Dinosaur National Monument in Utah.  Dinosaur NM is a place where the ground holding a large variety of dinosaur bones has been turned upright.  Int the late 1950’s, a large visitor’s center was built over the quarry.  We were able to walk right up to the rock face and look at the exposed fossils in the rock where they were found.  Some are even exposed so that you can touch a real dinosaur fossil in it’s natural setting.

While the dinosaur quarry is the main draw to the National Monument, the park has the Green River running through it.  After visiting the quarry, we drove out along the river back into a canyon where a settler had a homestead built in an idealistic setting.  This wasn’t so unique except that this settler was a woman who moved out to farm the land long before women even had a right to vote.  She lived there nearly 50 years and her cabin and homestead are now a part of the Monument.

After Dinosaur, we drove on into Colorado.  Up to this point, the roads had been clear of traffic for the most part and the towns few and far apart.  Northern Colorado is not the same however.  It was like being back in California again and not in a good way.  The towns are many, the people are many, and the scenery is spoiled by the population.  Steamboat Springs Colorado was the first place we had come to since California with the Share The Road signs for bicycles.  Trouble is these signs seem to be posted where the bicycles are the ones who don’t want to share the road by riding in herds that slow all traffic to a crawl.

It was a relief to make it up into the Routt National Forest.  This was the first of what would be 3 crossings of the Continental Divide in two days.  We had high hopes of finding a nice National Forest campground and spending the night.  We tried all of the 3 campgrounds off of Highway 40 to no avail.  All were closed.  So we pushed on hoping for a campground open nearby.

An hour later, we finally came up on the Wohlford Mountain Reservoir which had camping, but the layout, pit toilets and the characters there were so bad, we elected to gamble on something else down the road.  That something else was the Red Mountain RV resort in lovely downtown Kremling Colorado. Thankfully the place was quiet with full hook-ups and showers for only $10 more than the crappy reservoir campgrounds would have cost.

Tuesday May 29, 2012
Drove as far as Gering, Nebraska

Started out from Kremling and headed into the Rocky Mountain National Park.  The crossing of the Continental Divide here was much more impressive since the highway was purposely built up above the tree-line to a height of thirteen thousand feet.  The wind was fierce, the air was cold and yes, we saw snow again, but in its rightful place.

Here the kids did their first Junior Ranger program of the trip.  If you aren’t familiar with this, each National Park has a Junior Ranger program where they hand out a booklet and have the children fill out some of the activities.

They then take the booklet to the ranger of the park and he or she asks them about what they did and saw and grill them about filling out the booklets.  We did this a few years ago in a few parks in the southwest, but I don’t remember the rangers being such sticklers then. We were only in this place for the day, but the Ranger was not going to let us escape without the kids attending some Ranger program.  Luckily, that included viewing a movie.  We were on vacation to see the land, not sit in stuffy movie theaters, but to get the silly requirement over, we went and saw the same kind of movies we watch on the Discovery Chanel. With that requirement out of the way, they were pronounced Rocky Mountain National Park Junior Rangers.  And once more, it was to the highways.

And once more it was like being back in California. It was relatively slow going up and out of Colorado into Nebraska.  By the time we were in Nebraska, the scenery was more open and the traffic was less, but the speed limits didn’t improve like I had hoped.  We got slowed down from 65 to 60 miles per hour.

We found a little RV park in Gering Nebraska just south of the Scott’s Bluff National Monument.  The camp host first tried shoe-horning us in between two other RV’s.  It was silly because there were plenty of other open sites, so when I asked to be moved to a nice one a little away from the rest, he resisted because he was saving that “pull through” site for trailers.  I pointed out the fact that there were plenty of open sites, no one else arriving on a Wednesday night and that it was after 8 pm local time.  He relented, we moved camping spots and finished another day on the road.

Wednesday May 30, 2012
Drove as far as , Wind Cave National Park, South Dakota

Started out from Gering on our way to Agate Fossil Beds National Monument, Nebraska.  It was a place we had never heard of before, but spotted on the map when we were looking for places to go.   Our first stop of the day was breakfast.  We picked the Log Cabin from a list of restaraunts provided by the campground.  I think Chad and Natalie were possibly the first children who ever went into this place.  It was the first place I can remember that didn’t even have kids list of dishes.  The food was good enough and we needed the hearty meal later.

The next stop was Scott’s Bluff National Monument where we saw displays of the Oregon Trail.  The road we started out on was the old Oregon Trail road in fact.  The kids saw wagons and we walked though the exhibits and then headed north across the prairie.   It is just humbling to think of the effort the early settlers endured to cross this land without roads.  The rolling terrain rolls with the grasslands that are now also farmed, though not so entirely that you don’t get the feel of what it was like here two hundred years ago.

Agate Fossil Beds National Monument has been set aside in the heart of the Nebraska west.  Though the monument is named for the fossil beds found here, the real story of this park is its setting in the Lacota Nation.  We walked a three mile trail on the search of the very unimpressive fossil beds, but the walk was more about experiencing the prairie, wind and all.  We joked about the trail being up-hill both ways.  Physically going out and figuratively coming back against the wind that ceaselessly blew.  All were agreed by the end of our hike, that we were all doubly grateful we were not part of the original Oregon Trail.

From Agate, we headed north again into South Dakota.  The highway here slowed us down to 55.  I normally can’t drive 55, but the way up into the Black Hills was scenic and we went with the flow.  We traveled up into the Wind Cave National Park.  Being no stranger to the Junior Ranger badge program, we made sure we stopped in on the visitor center that evening to pick up the booklets so the kids could complete them that night  before our cave tour the next morning.  This let them fill out the activities sitting at the camp table rather than working on benches and display surfaces at the visitor’s center.

We camped in the National Parks campground in Wind Cave NP and had our first marshmallow roast.  Great fun.