Chhibber Trip

This is hard to do. I think I'll say it with pictures.
Section 3: CA to the Badlands

We left Pt. Arena very sadly and dropped Noah at the Sacramento airport, also sadly. Then we drove as far as Reno. Nevada has very little to offer after Colorado, Utah, and California. I think an enormous solar energy plant is called for. The next day we got as far as West Yellowstone. Yellowstone was really wonderful. I think there are three seperate things happening there, each worth the trip on its own. There's the
beautiful old Old Faithful Inn, the geothermal events, and the lovely meadows, rivers, mountains and wildlife. Here we are looking at creamsicle colors.



Here is our room at the Inn. There's a piano player in the big atrium in the evenings. One night Jo and I went to the veranda bar to sit and listen and wait for the geyser's 9:00 eruption. It's a big international scene. The eruption was late,and we were too cold to wait, but while we watched a female elk wandered out of the woods up to the hotel.




From Yellowstone we went to the Badlands. We had a lovely stay in Buffalo, Wyoming, where we did our laundry. The Black Hills area was wall-to-wall Harleys, as it was Sturgis weekend. (Look it up.) Leather, tattoos, noise and sunburn. It looked kind of fun, though. We went Crazy Horse, too. I would have liked it better without the bikers, and I also did not get any feeling of recent activity on the statue, or of any recent Lakota involvement in the project. In fact, in a brochure rack in a restaurant on the Pine Ridge Reservation there was a brochure for every other
conceivable local attraction, but not Crazy Horse. After that, I found Mt. Rushmore a cool, quiet spot with a much better (though comparatively tiny) sculpture on it.
We met Naomi and Ray at the Badlands. It was, unfortunately, our worst hotel experience, but it was really fun to drive around with them and see things. The Badlands is small--Naomi called it the Brycelet, and Zion-for-Spinal-Tap, both of which really fit.


Here we are in a restaurant on the reservation (Hannah's B'day).


I enjoyed the grasslands a lot. One morning Naomi and I got up at dawn to get some nice lighting. Here is a prairie dog. (Plague!)

Then we drove home as fast as we could. Well, we stopped at the corn palace, of course.