Interstate: Interior, SD

My route has taken me on I-90 through Wisconsin, Minnesota and now South Dakota. The further west I travel, the higher the speed limit. In South Dakota it is 75 miles per hour, so traffic flows at about 85-90 mph. At that rate one can cover a lot of ground. Depending on one's perspective, there is either very little or quite a lot to see. The swaths of farmland are, for the most part, flat. They are slightly less green than in Wisconsin or Minnesota. There are the occasional buffalo and herds of cattle. The sky, however, is vast and filled with different patterns and textures of clouds, some of which appear to be in vertical layers, as if they were fluffy skyscrapers. In late afternoon, the landscape is bathed in gorgeous light, rendering even the flattest of plains breathtakingly beautiful and making the pain of a day sitting in the car worth it.


Today I whizzed by a sign announcing that I was entering the Mountain Time Zone, gaining an hour in less than a second. I decided to spend my extra 60 minutes of sunlight during my visit to the Badlands National Park, in Interior, SD. From the highway, dotted only with round bales of hay and, pardon the pun, corny billboards every few miles exhorting travelers to visit the Corn Palace - "You'll Be A-maized!" and "It's All Ears!" (yes, I pulled off the highway to visit it) - you can't even imagine that just a few miles away are magnificent rock formations that form the Badlands. Created over the millenia by evaporating water that left red stripes of sediment sandwiched between lighter stone, the Badlands appear to be simultaneously ancient and futuristic. From certain angles the silhouettes of the craggy rocks seem to be castles in the sky, overlooking the grassy prairie where rabbits, elk and - of course - prairie dogs wander and graze. It is otherwordly, reminding me a little bit of Turkey's Cappadocia, and I doubt that the dozens of photographs I took will do it justice. It is a place probably best experienced in a 24-hour period, seeing both sunset and sunrise amidst the astonishing topography. Having said that, I don't regret not planning to spend the night there. That most likely would have involved booking accommodations ahead of time and, therefore, seeing pictures of the park beforehand. I went not knowing what I would be seeing and enormously enjoyed the surprise.